Mulling Things Over

draft for next towel warp

The current warp is nearing completion and it is time to begin organizing the next warp in the queue.

Drawing upon the Ars Textrina information provided by Patricia Hilts, I selected a twill block design, tinkering with it to be suitable for a tea towel.

Over several days I revisted the draft, editing it, tweaking it here and there until I had something I thought would work.

But.

It was 'too long' for a tea towel.  Not really, but longer than most people would find comfortable to use.  But not really suitable for a table runner.

So I parked the idea firmly on the back burner and let it simmer while I looked at it from several angles - so to speak.

In the end I decided it really was going to be too long and last night edited the draft one more time making a minor change that shortened the draft by about 2 inches, bringing it much closer to a standard tea towel size.

Now my tea towels are not all the exact same size.  I do have to make allowances for size of motif, how big a repeat is and so on, but they do tend to stay withing a range.  This draft now does that.

When I finished weaving for the day yesterday I took a look at how much warp is left on the beam.  I still have a hard time judging how much is left on the tiny warp beam of the Megado although I am beginning to get a sense of it.  So I think that maybe there might be enough warp for three more towels, but if there is only enough for two, I'm good with that.

If there is only enough for two, I should be able to cut this warp off the loom today and begin setting the loom up tomorrow for the above project.

Just as an aside...the original draft put the bulk of the warp yarns on shafts 5-12.  Since most of the heddles on the Megado were put onto the first four shafts, I did a shaft shuffle and changed the threads around so that they were placed on the shafts with the most heddles.  In the end I ran out of heddles on one of the shafts and had to tie on more.  But that sort of thing isn't a big problem, just a little annoyance that I know how to overcome.

And now I will begin working on the warp after this one.  I have been eyeing a mid-range blue, thinking about Delft pottery...