Adjustment

So, I'm back working on those scarf warps I wound last year and thought about a comment someone made, somewhere, about whether or not you could manipulate yarns into their 'proper' place.

Yes you can. 

Depending on the yarn, you can actually displace most (not all) yarns by up to about an inch.  What does it depend on exactly?

Well, first the yarn itself.  It has to have at least a little bit of elasticity.  It depends on the loom.  The longer the distance from the heddles to the back beam, the more you can displace the yarn from its path.

So for these scarf warps, I have been winding two ends, one fairly smooth, one very textured.  I thread them randomly, except for the selvedge.  Why?  Because I have found that a highly textured yarn at the selvedge can sometimes make a bit of a 'messy' selvedge, plus sometimes such highly textured yarns are weaker than smoother ones.  In this case, the textured yarn has less elasticity than the smooth one, but it can still be manipulated so that instead of being in one of the outside two heddles, I can move the two smoother yarns to the outside and shift the textured ones inside the selvedge.

This particular series is being woven in plain weave, but even if it was twill, I would still shift the selvedge threads in this way.

I tend to wind my warps with two ends at a time, in part to halve the winding time, in part to do something like this textile which will have the yarns threaded randomly for a less structured look to the cloth.

As always, sample first to make sure the yarns you are working with will tolerate what you intend to do with them.  As it happens these are yarns I used to use for 9 years weaving for the fashion designer and I am very familiar with them and how they behave.

For the book I included one colour and weave scarf woven in four end pinwheels.  I wound the two colours then when threading I manipulated the colours into their 4 x 4 end sequence to create the pinwheels. 

Again, I had worked with this yarn previously and knew it would tolerate this much deflection, in my Leclerc Fanny. 

Sample, sample, sample!