Know When to Fold Them

 

Pretty picture of a rayon shawl to offset the 'disaster' from yesterday.

So, yeah, still not perfect.  Still have things go horribly awry.  Still learning.

My intention was to beam a silk warp but my first mistake was not taking a closer look at the yarn I intended to use.  It was not 2/20 or even 2/30 but 2/60.

But it was even worse than that.  Some of the spools were actually much finer than 2/60, quite possibly 2/120.

Oh well, I'd used this yarn before and it was fine, so onwards I went.  Designed a draft.  Crunched the numbers to determine length/width.  Eyeballed the spools, figured I had enough yarn to go ahead.

Set up the loom with the appropriate number of sectional strings, set up the spool rack, set up the tension box.

Started beaming.  Snap.  Snap. Snapsnapsnap.

Before I'd gotten half way through beaming the first section it was obvious that the yarn was not going to work well as a warp. 

Why?

Hmm.  When *had* I used this yarn last?  It had been mostly stored in a cardboard box for...damn, close to 30 years.  

Gulp.

Given the age and the not ideal storage, it appeared to have not aged particularly well.  

I looked at the spool rack with the 48 spools on it.  I looked at the beam with all the strings hanging loose.  Multiplied that by 12. 

Picked up the scissors and snipsnipsnip.

The spools got put into a plastic bin and I tossed the bit of yarn I pulled off the beam.

Normally I have several planned warps in a queue, but I've been kind of busy of late and - knowing the silk would take a lot of time - thought I had lots of time to plan the warp after the silk one.  I do have a proto warp in the planning stages, but it is going to require several days of prep, winding the yarn from skeins onto spools and I wanted something I could work on now, not in a week or so.

Last night I dug through another box of yarn (only about two years in storage, but dust web accumulation meant that obviously I needed to deal with that yarn!) and figured out I had plenty of spools to do a simple scarf warp with that.  I won't be using the cashmere for weft, but more of my fine rayon stash.  Goodness knows I have a lifetime supply of that yarn to use up.

Instead of pushing on I chose to fold and get a new 'hand'.  There are enough stressful things in life - I didn't need to add working with an aging yarn as warp to the mix.

In the meantime, work on the on line classes continue.  I started working on my documentation for the first class and will continue picking away at that over the weekend.  Doug is working shifts for me at the craft fair and the treasurer reports decent sales for the first day.  I'm grateful to guild members who have worked to make the guild booth look attractive, providing things for sale (the guild takes a small commission on sales so the income will help pay the room rent) the people who are in the booth helping people make purchases, and spouses who have helped tote heavy loads into (and out of on Sunday) the venue and up the steep stairs to the guild room so we can set up for the guild room sale next week.

Many hands make light work, as they say, and no 'man' is an island.  Let's focus on the positive and put the negative behind us.