Peter Collingwood's No Math Centering method

Edited to remove bad ASCII art and hopefully be clearer...

As a brand new weaver I had the good fortune to take a workshop with Peter Collingwood.  He showed us how to centre a warp in the reed without using any math.  I have never forgotten it and use it every time I dress the loom.

Say you want a warp 10" wide and your reed is X length.

Lay a measuring tape along the length of the reed (in this case the reed is laying flat because I'm about to rough sley the warp).  So lay the measuring tape with zero at the left end of the reed.  Pinch the measuring tape at where ever the reed ends.  Let's say 36" just as an example.

With your right hand pinching at the 36" mark (the end of the reed) move your left hand to the 10" mark.  

Now still holding both points of the tape - 10 and 36 - bring your hands together and align the 10" mark and the 36" mark, effectively folding the tape together.

By moving your left hand to the 10" mark, you have subtracted 10" from the length of the tape, and then folding 10" and 36" together, you have divided the remainder of the length of the reed in half.  

Lay this 'half' down onto the reed again and where the tape ends is where you begin to sley the warp.

0-----10-----------------------------36-----------  one hand pinching 10, the other pinching 36

When 10 and 36 are pinched together to the bend in the tape is what you use to measure from the end of the reed to where you begin sleying.

In the photo above, the 10/36 is at the left hand side of the photo (my right side) and the loop is in the 'middle' of the reed.  This is where I will begin sleying.

No math.  Centred.  

Thank you, Peter Collingwood.  A technique I use every time I dress the loom.

Rough Sleying Again

Someone told me that my last blog post didn't make any sense, so I will try again.

If, as part of tying off your warp chain you tie the four 'arms' of the cross (X), untie them before you begin spreading the warp chain to the width required in the reed.

In this photo you can see how I've tied in four places, one on each side of the lease sticks on the 'top', one each side of the lease sticks on the 'bottom'.  (If you can't see the entire photo, try right clicking on it and open in a new tab to get the full version.  Blogger seems to be cropping photos in ways that don't show the entire picture.)

If these ties are not removed, they will prevent the threads from spreading out to the width needed in the reed.

Hope this makes more sense.

Rough Sleying

View from beneath as I rough sley

Just a reminder that if you tie off all four 'arms' of the cross to remove all four ties before doing anything about spreading the warp to the width in the reed.

I don't tie the waist of the X because I find it compresses the yarns and makes it more difficult to select the yarns in their proper order for rough sleying.  So I tie the 'arms' of the cross instead.

Yesterday I finished weaving the samples for Tien Chiu and will be sending them to her next week.  This completes the weaving I have been doing for her.  The last colour blanket was woven in 1:3 twill on my roller type counter balanced loom.  Yes, you can weave an unbalanced weave on such a loom, even without the shed regulator, if you sink the three shafts.  The shed was large enough I didn't even have to change to a low profile shuttle, just used my usual standard Leclerc shuttles.

I seem to be more or less recovered from all the travelling I have been doing and was able to think clearly enough to draw up a job list of what needs to happen in the next four weeks.

My editor should be arriving sometime around the end of July (date to be determined) and the studio needs a serious clean up.  Since it is easier to deal with wound warps by weaving them, I started rough sleying the first place mat warp this morning.  There are four of those, plus four table runner warps.  Since Doug is going pressing on the weekend, I'm going to try to weave as many of the mat warps as I possibly can and get them ready for wet finishing, pressing, then hemming (and then their final press).

Once those pre-wound warps are woven, I will begin shifting the heaps of bins and boxes to the annex for storage.  Because what she will be photographing is the studio, my work spaces, processes and so on for The Book.

If I can get that done quickly, I will start designing and weaving the rest of the book projects.  I have a couple done, friends are doing a few, which will help take the pressure off of me, and I may ask one more person if she would allow me to use some of her weaving as samples, too.  Still thinking that through.

After being on the lowest possible dose of the cancer drug I now have a much better idea of what my new 'normal' is.  And it isn't very much fun, but so much better than the higher doses, plus it appears to be keeping the cancer under control.  Now that I have an idea of what my new 'normal' consists of, I can begin to devise coping mechanisms.  With the muscle pain, it means shorter weaving periods and longer 'rest' breaks.  Since I also have a lot of conference administrivia to deal with, it will just be a matter of reducing my expectations in terms of what I can realistically accomplish in a day.

Life.  A constant round of adjusting to what is happening and focusing on what is important and what I need to let go of in terms of expectations...

Different Strokes

People adapt their processes to suit their personal preferences, the yarn they are using and their equipment.  I tend to weave within a fairly narrow range of yarns.  I'm very comfortable with them, know their limitations, how they will consistently behave.  (Doesn't mean they are always the same, just reasonably consistent!)

The above photo is an 11 meter long warp.  Half of it, actually.  The finished warp will be 24" in the reed.  With such a width, I only wind half of it, or 12".  The max width I will do on this warping board is 15" at 20 epi +/-

I tie off the four 'arms' of the cross, not the waist.  I used to just tie the waist, then would fight to find the waist and deal with how the threads became compressed.  So I take an extra few seconds and make four ties to save that PITA level I mentioned in yesterday's post.  Extra time at one stage to save time and PITA levels at the next is not wasted.  IMHO.  

Notice that I also do not tie this yarn every single yard.  This 11 meter long warp has the choke tie near the cross, the counting string near the end and just two more ties along the length of the chain.

Nor do I crochet the warp.  Here are the two chains for the next warp which will go into the loom later this afternoon.  Once the chain is tied off I take out the peg at the bottom of the board (the end of the chain, so to speak) and simply carefully drop the chain into a box or bin.  In this case, because two warp chains will go into the same container I use a larger plastic bin.

The bin is then taken to my work table (where I stand to work - otherwise I'd be sitting way too much - sometimes working standing up is A Good Thing to do).  The lease sticks and reed are set upon small boxes which raise the reed to a comfortable height for the rough sleying.

I also use really thick ties.  They are easier to see, tie and untie than a single strange of, say, 2/20 cotton.

This whole set up is now ready for me to remove the four ties securing the cross and to begin rough sleying.

Check the links 'rough sleying' or 'reed as raddle' for more info on this process.

Rough Sleying

When some people find out my preference for spreading the warp to it's weaving width is rough sleying there can be a variety of reactions.

One is, why do I 'waste' time sleying the reed twice?  If I'm sleying the reed anyway, why don't I just cut the loops and dress the loom front to back?  If I prefer back to front warping, why don't I just use a raddle?

The answers to those questions take longer to explain than a short answer, which is, this is the method I have tweaked to fit my needs and it works best for me.

How I got to that conclusion takes much more detail.

The warp above is an example of how spreading the warp using a reed is most definitely rough. 

I'm aiming for 24 epi, but I have - mostly - wound two ends at a time.,  Except for where I haven't.  This means that in order to rough sley there is a bit of mixing and matching going on.

I don't have a six dent reed wide enough, which would be the easiest size reed to use.  I have two six dent reeds - one of which is too narrow, the other which is way too wide.  So I tried a 12 dent reed, which is also 'long' and the spaces are narrow.

So then I picked up the 8 dent reed.  I am sleying \4\4\4\0\4\4\4\0 for the most part.  Except for when the stripes begin and end and I wound 2 ends of a colour to outline the stripe.  So where the stripe begins and ends, I am putting 6 ends in the dent.

When I used the 12 dent reed, I put those 2 ends in their own dent, but then the warp was spread wider than the weaving width of 25" and my warp packing was perilously close to being too narrow.  Using the 8 dent reed, I'm putting those two ends into the same dent as the background colour to make the warp narrower than the weaving width. 

Now this is not my preference, but for this textile having the warp beamed narrow is not going to cause any particular issues as it has enough elasticity to take the deflection from narrow to wide to narrow (as it draws in during the weaving).

When I demonstrate this technique people get very concerned about how 'messy' the threads can look.  So long as I have tied a good tight choke tie, any disruption in the threads isn't going to matter much as long as I don't yank on the ends and pull slack up out of the length of the chain.

So why don't I just use a raddle?  Well, when I started winding and beaming warps on the Fanny I did borrow a raddle.  But I found that filling the raddle really wasn't much of a time saver - the objection some have to rough sleying a reed - that it will take longer than filling a raddle.  The real reason I gave up on a raddle though was that the sections were too large for the usual yarns that I use.  I wanted a finer separation of the yarns so there would be less tendency for them to wrap around each other.

In the end, after trying both - and I tried the raddle several times - I find this method more efficient even though I may take a little bit more time at this stage which will save me a lot more time at the beaming stage.  Of course my default length is 11 meters.

Or at least...this has been my experience.

But there are many ways to accomplish all of the stages of weaving - from winding the warp in the first place, spreading the warp for weaving, beaming, threading (or the other way round if you prefer front to back), tying on.

It depends on your goals which processes will work 'best'.  It depends on your personal preferences, your equipment, yarn, environment. 

As they say...Your Mileage May Vary.

Currently reading The Nothing That Is; a natural history of Zero by Robert Kaplan

Just Do

I am having a much harder time than I had hoped getting back into the swing of studio things.  Yesterday turned into a 'people first' kind of day although I did get my cheque book balanced and some bills paid.  But I ran out of energy by 4:30 so we had an early dinner and vegged for the evening catching up on some tv.  Today I had appointments in the morning and errands after lunch so it was going on for three before I even thought about the studio. 

Not being overly endowed in the little grey cells department, I looked at all the boxes and bins with wound warps and decided to tackle the one towel warp.  I thought - briefly - about firing up the AVL and decided I didn't want to deal with it.  I wanted something that I didn't have to think about and between the very bland place mat warp and this bright cheerful towel warp, the choice was easy. 

Rough sleying took just a few minutes, then the loops were put onto the apron rod.    

The warp was then passed under the breast beam and over the valet.  The lease stick were moved as close to the ceiling as possible.  They have 'caught' any minor slack in the warp ends and I can now begin rolling the warp onto the warp beam.  When the weights are close to the valet I will remove them, groom the next section, one half of the warp at a time, and when both halves are as good as I can get them, the lease sticks will again be moved to as high as they can go.  The warping valet allows me to groom at least a yard or a little more at a time.  For this 11 meter long warp, I will re-position the weights about eight or nine times.  Beaming this way takes only a few minutes and then I can start threading.  I should be able to start weaving on this warp after my errands tomorrow.  

Rough

Here is warp number 3 (as in counting down from the 8 I had left to do after I thought I was done with them) rough sleyed ready to be beamed.

How much longer does it take to rough sley instead of use a raddle?  I don't know.  I haven't used a raddle for 15 or more years when I decided that a raddle really wasn't giving me the results I wanted and switched to rough sleying a reed.

Why did I change?  At the time I was using quite fine yarns (2/20 and 2/16 cotton) - the raddle I had borrowed simply had too many ends per section so they tended to grab onto each other and snag, then tangle.  The 2/20 cotton was around 36 epi, the 2/16 at 32 epi.  A raddle just wasn't working all that well for me and rather than continue to fight with it during the beaming, it seemed a lot more productive to just use a different tool.

What I've found is that rough sleying works for every yarn at every set I tend to use.  YMMV.

The above warp is 16 epi, wound two at a time and is rough sleyed in an 8 dent reed.  There are 160 ends in total for a width in the reed of 10".  I turned on my boom box, set up the reed, lease sticks, removed the ties from the four arms of the X and rough sleyed it, all before the first cut on the cd finished.

Before the 12th cut on the cd was over I had beamed the warp, threaded, sleyed and tied it on, throwing the first 6 picks of header.  The cd in question was one of Neil Young's so the cuts are maybe a bit longer than normal, but not all that much.  :)