Waste Not

 

in the beginning - green weft is the header

"Waste not, want not" goes the homily.

But what exactly are we 'wasting'?  Is it that bit of thread at the beginning of the warp?  The end?  Our time?

What is 'valuable' to us?  

Insomnia has been a too frequent visitor of late and generally that means the thought squirrels start racing around in my brain.  Last night I thought about waste.  And physics.

How are they related, you may be thinking?

Well, here is an example...

I took a workshop with Morfydd Roberts at Convergence in Toronto in 1986.  Morfydd was a textile designer who worked with UK mills designing and producing short run cloth.  At one point in the workshop she explained that in a production run the first 18" of the warp is considered the heading.  That it took that long for the warp ends to settle in, establish the width, make sure everything was working properly.  This was the time to double check for any threading or sleying errors and correct them.  

When I got home I began to pay more attention to how my warps began.  And I realized that leaving a couple of inches of unwoven warp at the very beginning improved things.  Maybe not a lot, but it took less time for the warp threads to settle in and even out.

When I tried to crush the weft too close in to the rod, my tension actually suffered.  And I realized that the warp ends needed that little bit of space, of breathing room, to find their proper place.

Am I wasting that extra 2" of warp?  Since I'm getting better results more quickly...I would say no.

Last night I tried to think of ways that 'waste' happens where we don't fuss about it.  I thought about various ways of making things, coming up with examples of 'waste' that we accept without question.

The gravy left in the pan.  Vegetable peels.  Batter on the mixer blades.  The smoothie in the blender.

Loom waste is.  There is a reason Loom Waste is included in every project planning form.  There will be warp that cannot be woven, and will be 'waste'.  

There are ways to minimize the waste.  In tying on, one can lash on instead.  The threads for tying on could be incorporated as fringe.  But ultimately, there will still be some 'waste' involved.

There are times when trying to minimize wasting yarn, one invests a lot of time.  And that is a judgement call we each get to make.

I base my approach on valuing my time as a priority.  I work with natural fibres so that my loom waste will eventually return to the earth.  I give my thrums to another person to use (who they go to changes depending on who wants/needs what I have).  l try not to be wanton in my waste, but neither do I agonize over it.

My warps tend to be 'long' so that the waste is spread out over multiple items.  The degree of waste I produce is in the pennies, not dollars, per yard woven.  On narrower warps, the header section is actually less than on a wider warp.  So for a tea towel like the above, the threads will settle into their comfort zone in a couple of inches.  By leaving that 2" of unwoven warp, doing the 'throw three picks, THEN beat them in (I squeeze, some people recommend a firm beat - I say it depends on what you are working with), my header is generally about 1/2" before I begin with the weft I'm going to use.  In the above photo I don't have quite 1/2" woven yet, so I'll throw a couple more picks before I begin the actual towel.  That should close up the remaining gaps.  It also gives me a firm foundation to beat against.

The physics?  That's the angle at which the ends need to bend between where they are woven and where they are tied on to the bar.  If the groups are too large, the outer ends in the group will need to bend a lot further than the interior ends.  This will potentially cause tension issues - which should even out over time/distance woven.  But if the yarn is on the weaker side, could also cause broken ends.  Maybe.  It depends.

If the knots are 'small', you wind up needing to tie a lot more of them, and in the end this makes getting a good/even tension more difficult.  I find that about 1" of warp works well.  I push this at times, one way or another, depending on how many ends I'm working with and whether or not they divide equally into 1" increments.  They don't always because of the design, which may not be a round number.

People can spend a great deal of time tying the perfectly tensioned warp.  I'm here to say that slight inconsistencies will work themselves out in the header.  So I don't get too focused on getting 'perfect' tension.  Just to be as consistent as I can.  It's kind of like kneading bread.  Do it until it's 'done'.  If you keep doing it, you can wind up with poor results.  How do you know?  You just have to try it and see.  I think it took me 7 batches of making bread from scratch before I could feel when the dough was 'done' and didn't have hard crusts anymore.  Which reminds me - it seems to take me 7 times to learn new processes in weaving, too.  :D