Fix

I know I've posted about this before but thought that it is time to revisit it because it is just so darned clever!

First learned this from Kerstin Fro:berg...

Although I try to remove knots from the yarn as I wind a warp, sometimes they aren't obvious, or sometimes, as with this very textured yarn, the problem is not a knot, per se, but a a flaw in the spinning which creates a large lump.  So it was with this warp...a large clump that snuck into the warp and which was not happy in the reed.  The only solution was to 'cut it out'.

What Kerstin does is thread a repair end into the same heddle as the culprit, weave for 2-3 cm, then cut out the bad end and continue weaving with just the repair end until the original is long enough to be brought back through the heddle, reed and pinned to the woven cloth.

The beauty of this technique is that no needle weaving is required after the cloth is removed from the loom and with a yarn this textured, that is a real bonus!

My contribution to the technique is what I do if I have the yarn on cones:

I purposefully kept the dregs left over from warp winding just in case I had to do any repairs and only on the 15th warp did I need to do this, but because I had it was a piece of cake to fix the problem.

Check the video clip but essentially I take the loose end of the yarn, pass it up through the bottom of the cone and through the top.  The weight of the cone is usually enough although weight can be added if you are weaving with higher tension than the cone provides.  To lengthen the yarn when the cone rises to the back beam, it is a very simple matter to grab the yarn at the base and pull more yarn off the cone from the bottom.