All Things End

 

All things come to an end.  Someday.  Nothing lasts 'forever'.  We hate to see the good things go, can hardly wait for the bad to be behind us.  But all things do end.

Warps come to an end.  Yarn packages get used up.  Projects get completed.  Or not.  Perhaps their demise is simple abandonment.

But all things end.

I am coming down to the wire on the latest warp.  Yay!  I emptied the cone of very dusty cotton/hemp yesterday.  It looks like enough yarn to weave three more towels.  That will make 18 towels, out of a possibility of 19 on the warp.  So I'm left with a decision to make - do I weave one towel completely different from the rest in terms of colour, fibre, texture?  Or do I sacrifice the balance of the warp and move on to the next?

Well dear reader, that was an easy decision.  The balance of the warp will be sacrificed.  (No, not thrown away but tossed into my 'recycle' bin to be given to a spinner to use to make 'art' yarns.)

After I finished weaving yesterday, I wound off the rest of the cotton/hemp, looked at my options and decided I didn't need another 'orphan' towel.  One that would require me messing with the tie up because the cotton/hemp and the merc. cotton need different numbers of interlacements.  I will reserve that gold merc. cotton for another warp where I can use it in a longer series, setting up the warp specially to be woven with merc cotton weft.

So I pulled out my bins of warp yarns, set up the next warp (shades of red - again - what can I say, there is *plenty* of red!), put the yarns from the current warp 'away'.  Some of those yarns were put in with the blue/green cotton, some was reserved for weft only (that 'old' black, still good enough for weft, but a bit of a PITA as warp), the rest went back into the 'neutral' bin.  Not sure - yet - what I will combine with those for another 'neutral' warp.  Still mulling that over.  Still lots of weaving to do with the reds/purples/blue/green.  I'm sure I'll come up with something.  Because once I use up the linen, I still have 2/20 merc cotton.  I didn't just have those boxes of Brassard 2/20, in my rummaging I found a number of cones, likely sourced from Robin and Russ.  And if you recognize that name, you *know* how old that stuff is!  :D

But gradually, I am weaving down my stash.  It is becoming apparent that I am having a lot more difficulty seeing these finer threads, though, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all that fine silk I inherited.  The option running in first place is to ply some of them together, then use them on a rayon warp.  I still have a *lot* of Brassard's 2/16 bamboo, and it works really well as warp with silk as weft, making a nice quality of cloth and making it possible to offer them at a lower price than all silk.  Except it took 5 hours to fill a bobbin with some of that fine plied silk...oh well, weaving is no longer my profession...

I have been ignoring some things in favour of just weaving as much as I can.  But time marches on, and pretty soon deadlines will not be just pending, but looming.  (Pun intended)

So I did print out some stuff to use in creating the class for SOS, did a ruler wrap to confirm the epi for the sample to use for the class, mused about some options for the class, completely changed my mind at least three times, and now have a (new) direction to go which I think will be 'better' for teaching purposes.

Onwards!