Invisible

 

a 'second' in the making - shorter than planned with a crossed thread causing long floats.

In the continuing theme of 'still not perfect' I got the next warp set up and ready to weave.  There is a sleying error in there somewhere.  One dent has 5 ends in it.  

Do you think I can find it?  Nope. Not at all.  And I tried!  For nearly 20 minutes.

Problem is my eyesight isn't great right now.  Not sure if it's the baby cataracts (eye doc says not likely) or the shingles (possible) or just aging eyes, generally, but I'm having a lot of trouble focusing on 'fine' things.  Like this 2/20 mercerized cotton.  Especially in the darker colours.

After trying - and failing - to find the error I decided I would just live with it.  I mean, some cultures will put a 'mistake' in their cloth on purpose to appease the god(s).  (Surely if the error is on 'purpose' it's not a 'mistake'?  But I digress.)

At any rate, at 5 pm I gave up the hunt for the 'missing' end and decided I'd get started weaving and have a wee look this morning.

So I wove the header and nope, still couldn't see it.  So I started weaving.  I'm pleased with the fine linen I'm using for weft.  The bobbins had several days to 'steep' in the humidor and were behaving quite nicely and so I kept going.

Until I was about 3" from the end of the towel when oops.  My eye caught a problem.  Not the dent with 5 ends in it.  Oh my no, nothing so simple.

It was a pair of crossed ends between the heddles and the reed.  After weaving nearly an entire towel, the threads had loosened to the point where they were sagging in the shed.  

Why didn't I see them sooner?  Well, the warp is 960 ends with 4 per dent.  The two ends were white, in the middle of a white area and the weft is white.  And it's only visible on a few of the sheds.  Basically invisible.

So I wove another section of waste yarn, cut the two offending threads, put them in their proper dents and pinned them to the web again.

And wove the second towel.  Still haven't found that mis-sleyed end, though.

The pattern is pretty subtle when I'm sitting at the loom.  It shows the most in the blue stripes due to the high contrast between the blue and white.  But the overall undulation is pretty obscure.  Until the cloth is the 'right' angle - like the front of the breast beam.

I'm pleased enough with this warp.  The current weft looks like it will be enough to weave 4 towels, with a smaller tube of a different linen yarn that will most likely weave two towels.  After that I have two more small tubes of linen that I may use on this warp, then work on the 2/20 bleached merc. cotton stash.  It's wound onto plastic spools and I can use my lazy kate to wind from the spools onto the bobbins.  Be great to use that yarn up, too.

Depending on how much warp is left I may use a dark blue merc cotton for weft as well.  But first I have to see how far I get with the linen and white merc. cotton.