Thinking about 'unseen forces' in weaving, it's time to remind people that if you live in an arid climate, or more especially, one where the relative humidity swings seasonally, you may run afoul of the issue of low humidity in the air.
When that happens, things go 'wrong' and it may be difficult to tell why that is so.
When the relative humidity in the environment drops, weaving can become a challenge.
If you have an electric bobbin winder, you might start getting static discharge shocks while winding bobbins. For some yarns, just winding a warp on a warping board or mill can see the generation of static discharges.
When the relative humidity drops, wooden equipment can develop issues as the wood shrinks. The loom or whatever might develop squeaks, and screws become loose so the loom can go out of alignment or wobble.
Some yarns will behave poorly. Linen and other cellulose yarns can suddenly stop co-operating. Linen in particular will become stiff and unruly, and not want to feed off a rotating bobbin nicely.
In the case of linen as weft, I wind bobbins ahead of time and store them in a 'humidor'. And I don't fill the bobbins higher than the flanges on the bobbin because linen is dense and a very full bobbin can create excess drag that might be too much stress for selvedges.
If it gets very dry, other yarns will become less co-operative as well.
If the relative humidity drops below 40% in the house I run a humidifier. Everything just behaves 'better' and I have fewer issues with dry rough hands.
I still have a little linen yarn left that I need to use up, but I'm trying to work on a few other things right now. Even though I'm not weaving with linen at the minute, the humidifier has been running for over a month, and will continue to run until spring when the relative humidity returns to higher than 40%.
Sometimes it's not you, it is an unseen force at work. But now? You know to take that into consideration if you experience wild swings in relative humidity where you live.
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