Far From Ideal

 

I wasn't entirely happy with how the 2/20 warps were weaving off.  I knew when I started on them that I was pushing the boundaries of 'ideal' or 'best' practice, and frankly?  If I'd only been doing one warp I would have simply gritted my teeth and done it, dusted my hands and moved on.

But I don't have just one warp's worth of yarn.  I have what is beginning to feel like a never ending supply of the stuff.

I'm being reminded - daily - of how much play time is involved with very fine yarns (8400 yards per pound or around 5-6 miles...)

As each warp went on - and came off - I was getting more annoyed at myself for continuing a process that I knew was less than ideal and with this one determined to change what I was doing (finally!)

So I set up this warp, with its various different sized tubes, so that the yarn would pull off from the end of the tube instead of the side.

When you pull from the side, the 'ideal' is to have all of the yarn packages be the same weight.  Then as you pull the yarn off of them, they all have the same degree of drag, exerting the same (or similar) amount of tension on the threads.

With some tubes full, some half full, and some of them nearly empty (yes, I'm trying to use up my stash!), the threads were going onto the beam at various rates of tension.

In the past this hadn't been a huge problem because the AVL had a beam with a one yard circumference.  The Megado has a beam of something like 14.5".

It was making a difference.

The AVL also had a much longer distance from breast to back beam which also allowed minor tension issues to resolve over a longer distance.  With the Megado and a shorter footprint, there was less room for the yarn to settle.  That coupled with the much smaller circumference was causing some problems.

I kept going because they weren't being transferred to the cloth, in part because I cut and serge the cloth, then wet finish them.  During wet finishing any tiny difference in tension seemed to be eased out of the cloth itself.

But I wasn't happy with how the yarns behaved in the loom.  The ends that were too tight (relative to the others) tended to 'float' in the shed and I'd hit them with the shuttle in the unclear shed - and sometimes they would break.  The ones that were too loose would sometimes sag and create a shed that wasn't clear and one symptom of this was the weft loops that kept developing.  If I saw them before I wove very far I'd back up and unweave, remove the loop, then continue.

Each thing by itself wasn't really a big deal and nothing I hadn't dealt with before.  But honestly?  I'm old and cranky and not much given to putting up with such things right now.

So today I set the warp up to be pulled from the end of the tube.  It seemed to be 'better' but once I started threading I could feel that again the fuller tubes and the ones that were more empty were beaming on at slightly different tensions.  

I'm hoping that overall the situation has improved and will wait and see how this warp weaves off before I decide if the change was an actual improvement.  Or not.

But the improvement I noted in the beaming may well be sufficient to continue doing it this way.  Fingers crossed it will extend to the weaving, as well.

Just now did about 1/3 of the warp, realized I'd made a threading error, back tracked and found the error and fixed it.  It wasn't very far back and didn't take all that long in the scheme of things, but I am done for today.

Time to make dinner and veg a bit.  Who knows, maybe I'll feel like hemming tonight.  I have 7 more of the first red warp to hem, the 'neutral' towels (18), and today ran the second red warp through so now there are 17 of those that will be ready to hem as soon as I press them.  They are 'steeping' in a plastic tub which will even out the damp/almost too dry parts and make them a lot easier to press.  Manana...