Hubris

 

It's no secret that I am not perfect and prone to making mistakes.  Such was the case with the current warp.

Yesterday I finished setting up the loom and wanting to know if it was going to work the way I wanted it to, I decided to go ahead and quickly weave a 'sample' (full sized) to make sure all was well.

I got about half way through the 'sample' when something kept catching my eye.  Not full on, but in my peripheral range - or in my side vision.  When I would turn and view the area full face, nothing looked obviously wrong - but the niggling thought that something *was* haunted me.  In the end, because I couldn't spot the actual area of 'wrongness' I decided to finish weaving the full sized sample and see if the wet finishing would reveal the problem.

After weaving the sample I cut it off and took it up to the desktop where I could see the draft better, and yet...I still couldn't see it.  So it was decided I would inspect and repair the last warp and the new sample and see what the water would reveal.

When I got mobile this morning, I went down and started inspecting, beginning with the new sample and oh, hello, what have we here???  I isolated the 'wrongness' and went back to the desktop and fairly quickly isolated the issue in the cloth.  I tried to view the problem on the monitor but I still wasn't spotting it so I printed it out in a large format to make it easier to see.

What I had done was thread two blocks of an 8 shaft fancy twill, then for the centre I had split the tie up to weave the design along the selvedges, and a 'plain' centre field.  (Not exactly 'plain' more like an area of basket weave and plain because of the advancing twill threading.)

I still couldn't see it so what I did was to use the printed out tie up and divide the tie up into quadrants.  Since 3 out of 4 quadrants were the fancy twill, and the 4th was plain weave tie up, I could begin to 'see' each quadrant more effectively.  Starting with the plain tie up (because I had made a mistake in that area in the first place, corrected before I began weaving) I carefully checked to make sure the plain weave was correct.  Since the 'mistake' was in the area where the centre field was being woven, the mistake had to be in the quadrant containing that portion of the tie up.

Voila!  I had not completed that part of the tie up and there were not 1 but 2 treadles that were not correct.

This sample has been valuable in another way.  I had thought that, due to the extra tie downs in the centre field I would have to beat slightly harder in that area, but in the end when I cut it off the loom and measured it, the centre field is beaten too tightly.

Right now I'm putting the towels I had ready for wet finishing through the washer/dryer and will press tomorrow.  For now, it's lunch time and then I will go back, tie on again, and weave another sample.  Hopefully a 'correct' one.

We'll see how that goes...