Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Procrastination Rules Today

So instead of threading this warp, I'm blogging about how I would be doing it, if I were actually doing it...  

The threading repeat is a fairly simple one - an advancing twill that flips in the centre.  Normally I could do this without a visual aid, but today I'm really dragging and procrastination is making me very - um - distractable?  So here I am, once more on the computer and instead of writing that article (with deadline looming) or threading or winding warps, I'm blogging...again.  :}


I printed out the draft because I want to thread it in unequal sections.  Something that the iWeaveit app won't do.  So it's back to 'old school'....

Fiberworks software allows you to set the size of the font you can print out a draft, and since it is a fairly small repeat at just 32 ends, I set it for 5 per inch - the largest I could get and still keep the draft all on one line.  I could have set the printer to print landscape but that seemed too complicated for me to handle today and 5 looked large enough to easily read on the tv tray I set beside the loom to put my stuff on.

Then I threaded one repeat looking for logical 'breaks' - groupings that made visual sense to me so that I could do the threading 3 or 4 ends at a time and see the progression, both in my mind's eye and on the paper.

Once I had one group done, I drew in the breaks with a thicker blue pen so that I could easily see where the breaks were, pull the next heddles into alignment and thread each 3 or 4 thread group and tie them into a slip knot.


Once I have the entire repeat done, I tie the entire repeat into another loose slip knot so that I can easily check each group for accuracy if needed.

The other 'check' on my threading is that by the end of each repeat I should end on an 'even' number of ends.  In other words, if by the end of the repeat I have a single end instead of a pair of ends next in line, I've made a mistake somewhere. (The warp was wound two ends at a time.) With each repeat tied off, it's an easy matter to go back and double check the repeat I've just done to see where I've gone wrong. 

Or at least that's the theory.

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