Sectional Beaming

 

As usual, there are so many subtleties in weaving that one SOS student needed to see how the beginning of the warp would look like.  I thought it might prove more helpful to see the end of the warp in order that they could see how the sections were all consistently lined up.

The leader strings I use are seine twine.  Seine twine was engineered to be used to make seine nets (hence the name), and as such the yarn is very dense and very strong.  Weavers use it for rug warps and other tasks.  Before TexSolv heddles and cord were developed, seine twine was used for many of the loom cords/tie ups.  Some still use it because it's a lot cheaper than TexSolv.  

As it happened I had a spool of seine twine when I got my AVL because I'd been making rag rugs, so the AVL got kitted out with seine twine leader cords.  When I 'retired' the AVL I kept all the leader strings and in fact, most of the leader strings on the Megado are re-used strings from the AVL.  I had to change the length, but that was a simple matter of tying the loop so that it was shorter and the knot fit within the space between the rakes, but was still long enough to reach up over the back beam.

The warp gets beamed one section at a time.  I have one inch sections because I knew when I bought the loom that I needed the smaller option due to my using fairly fine threads for warp.  As it is, I have done projects that required 72 ends per section, although that was not common.  I did do 60 and 48 epi more frequently, though, so having a studio bobbin rack that held 60 spools meant I could easily beam my finer thread warps.

My current series is 32 epi, which is what the photo shows.

The warp is not a solid colour.  It is made up of equal parts peacock and bleu moyen (from Brassard).  The two colours are the same value, so they don't announce themselves as being very different.  However, when woven, they do show up as a subtle difference.

These are the towels that I cut off the loom a few days ago and wet finished.  The colour difference doesn't show up much in the photo, although you can just see some 'streaks' happening.  Those are the two different colours showing up.  With one colour slightly different than the other, when I used a periwinkle blue for weft (right towel) the warp shifted to the blue end of the spectrum.   When I used navy blue (left towel) for weft, the warp shifted to the green end.

Overall I have had a lot of fun working through this series, but once these colours are used up (a total of 5 warps) I will be changing to something else.  Likely shawls, so I can have some available for the fall craft fair.  Maybe.  We'll see.  That's the goal.  Without goals with a deadline, I tend to procrastinate, so I'm announcing it here to remind myself what my plan is.

Always keeping in mind "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.”...  A fitting quote considering Robbie Burns day is coming up?