Light Bulb Moments with Waffle Weave

By Leigh

OK. So the waffle weave sampler turned out pretty well except for the bleeding red yarn. With the information it gave me, I pressed on to the barcode inspired dishtowels with confidence.

However, after several inches of weaving, I was puzzled when my selvedges looked like the photo on the left. Even though I am using a floating selvedge warp thread, I was having a problem catching the outermost warp thread (which is not the floating warp). What was the problem? This hadn't happened on my sampler.

I rechecked my threading, but everything was fine there. No mistakes in the point twill threading. I decided to take another look at waffle weave in Mary Black's Key to Weaving. It didn't take long to diagnose my problem.

Yes, I had threaded in a point twill, but I had started at the center of my loom and threaded going outward. Due to the number of ends I had, my threading ended on shaft four, like this.....

The other selvedge was the same way, so that the threading started and ended on shaft four.

What it's supposed to look like is this ......

Threading is supposed to start and end on shaft one. It would seem inconsequential, but because of waffle weave's tie-up and treadling, it's not!

That was light bulb moment number one. Light bulb moment number two came while trying to decide how to correct the threading. I didn't know if it would be better to add or subtract some warp to have it start on the first shaft. To decide, I decided to recheck my project width math.

From sampling, I had learned to expect about a 30% loss in width after washing and drying. To determine the width of my warp, I had taken my project width (18 inches) and added 30%. From that calculation I measured 702 warp ends, which measured 23.5 inches in the reed.

This time, I subtracted 30% from the width in the reed (23.5), and was surprised when the result wasn't 18 inches, but about 16.5. Well, duh. 30% of 18 is not the same as 30% of 23.5. 30% of 18 is about 5.4, while 30% of 23.5 is 7. Light bulb moment number two was in realizing that how I calculated draw-in and shrinkage made a big difference in the final width of my project.

My challenge then, was to add enough extra warp for my finished project to be 18 inches, while starting and ending the threading on shaft number one.

There may have been an easier way to do this, but here's what I came up with:

What I did was to use Peggy Osterkamp's 2-Stick Header, and tie my additional warp on to it. You can either click on the above photo to enlarge it a little, or there's a close-up below.

I weighted the two bouts of warp in the back with half gallon milk jugs filled with water. I was able to experiment with the amount of water in each jug until I got a straight, even fell.

This does widen the borders quite a bit, but who in the world (besides my readers :) is gonna know that I didn't plan it this way in the first place.

Next time I would use a stouter stick to tie the warp onto, although hopefully there won't be a next time. And perhaps someone has a better idea? Two enlightening flashes of understanding are enough for me in one day. I'm rather worn out from it all.

© 14 Aug 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related Posts:
Waffle Weave
Barcode Waffle Weave Update
Barcode Waffle Weave Off the Loom
List of all my Waffle Weave Posts

About That Knee Beam .....

I have been weaving away on a one yard sample warp, trying out various yarns and ideas with multiple tabby weave. Things were going pretty well until I advanced the warp. I was surprised that as I treadled, my knees were hitting the apron rod. That had never happened before. Finally, after treadling bow legged for a bit, I stopped to take a closer look.....

That's when I realized that the apron cords weren't going over and behind the knee beam. Somehow I had missed it altogether when I pulled the apron rod up to lash the warp to it.

If I had puzzled about usefulness of that knee beam before, I certainly understand its functionality now. And I won't forget to make sure my warps travel the correct path anymore, either!

© 2 May 2008 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Arrrrrgh! Threading Error!

I'd only woven a couple of inches on my first M's & O's dish towel when I noticed a threading error! Can you spot it? Dilemma! I'm too close to a deadline and too far along to unweave. Oh well. More on this project later!

© 2008 Leigh's Fiber Journal

Related Posts:
M's & O's: The Basics
M's & O's: Weaving Observations
M's & O's Dishtowels

Placemats?

It's been awhile since I've blogged about weaving. This is partly because a lot of other things have popped up, but also because I've had my last weaving project off the loom for awhile and have been wondering what to do about it.

About a month ago, I posted about preparing to weave some placemats (that post here). Weaving went well, but once the fabric was off the loom and machine washed and dried, I discovered that it looked like this:

This is plain weave with 8/2 unmercerized, unbleached cotton. The diagonal geometric textured effect was totally unplanned and not exactly what I was looking for. As I puzzled over it and whether or not I liked it, I vaguely recalled that this phenomenon is called "tracking."

Finally I decided to see what pressing would do. This is what it looked like after that....

As you can see, this did not completely eliminate the effect. I admit that I wondered whether I might have gotten better results if I had put more time and effort into pressing. On the other hand, my plan for this fabric was easy care placemats as a gift. I doubted that the intended recipient would be willing to go to very much trouble to keep them smoothed out.

Still, I puzzled over what had caused it and how to prevent it in the future. At first I figured that it must have something to do with the type of yarn I'd used. So I googled, "weaving tracking" (without the quote marks). From that I found Holly Shaltz's web page, in particular an article entitled "Plying a Balanced Yarn". From this article I learned that tracking is related to unbalanced yarn.

To be honest, I don't know a lot about commercial weaving yarns. I took a closer look at the yarn I'd used .....

..... and observed some inconsistencies in the twist. I never would have thought to check that out first, but it does confirm the wisdom of that well-worn (if not somewhat dreaded) phrase, "Sample, sample, sample."

So. I will definitely make a sample the next time I use this yarn, which will probably be mixed with other colors and brands of 8/2 unmercerized cottons. As to the placemats? I'm not sure. I reckon I'll move on to Plan B, as soon as I figure out what Plan B is.

© 2007 Leigh's Fiber Journal

Related Posts:
What I've Learned About Tracking

Warping the Glimakra: The 3 Duhs

By Leigh

Duh #1 - Putting on too wide a warp

This is not a tremendously big deal, but I should know better than to try too many new things at once. The new loom should have been enough. I thought I was doing good to refrain from trying a fancy 8 shaft pattern, but I did allow myself to succumb to weaving something I'd never woven before, a blanket.

Duh #2 -Initially winding onto the cloth beam backwards

In this photo, it is wound on correctly. At first however, I had the apron cords going around the other way.

To the mechanically minded this probably would not have been a big deal, but to me it was a major panic. I had everything threaded and tied up and ready to weave. I thought I'd have to re-do it all! Fortunately, my DH looked calmly at the situation and started winding the beam until it unrolled the apron cords. He kept on winding and much to my amazement, it wound itself the correct way. If he hadn't been around it probably would have been a bigger duh because I would have untied the whole thing to correct it. Not something I would have enjoyed especially because of Duh #1.

I think what threw me off was the knee beam. My other loom doesn't have one and I'd never had to deal with one before. I'm assuming it's there to keep the cloth out of the way so that one can get one's knees under the loom.

Duh #3 - Tying up the "wrong" sets of lamms

"Wrong" here is a little relative. It has nothing to do with overall results, but everything to do with which side of the cloth I was going to look at while I was weaving. And this has to do with how the pattern draft is written and which way the shed is formed on the loom: rising or sinking.

My introduction to this entire concept took place shortly after I started to weave in 2000. I decided to weave a table runner using a pattern from Marguerite Davison's A Handweaver's Pattern Book. I was puzzled after I began weaving. While it looked pretty on the loom, it didn't look like the picture of the pattern I'd chosen. To my surprise, after I finished and cut it off the loom, there was the pattern I wanted, on the bottom! I soon learned that this was because all the drafts in this book are notated for sinking shed looms. My jack loom had a rising shed. That meant that if I wanted to look at the pattern while I was weaving, I needed to tie up the treadles according to the blank spaces in the draft, not the X's.

Usually tie-ups for rising shed looms such as jack looms, use O's to show the treadle tie-up. Sinking sheds such as counterbalance looms, use X's. The two drafts on the left will produce exactly the same woven pattern. While most modern weaving books show the rising shed tie-up, the older A Handweaver's Pattern Books (originally published in 1944 before jack looms came into popular use) uses X's.

But what about a countermarche loom, where part of the shed rises and the other part sinks? For my first treadle tie-up, I followed the instructions on the set-up video, which showed tying up the upper lamms first, and then tying up the bottom ones in the opposite pattern. However the video showed a simple plain weave, whereas I wanted a simple straight twill. What I didn't realize is that the short, upper lamms pull the shafts dow to sink the shed, while the long, lower lamms lift the shed because they are attached to the overhead jacks, which pull the shafts up. (Photos of this stuff on this post.)

Countermarche looms are usually considered rising shed looms for the sake of tying up the treadles. They do differ from jack looms in that every shaft has to be tied, but they can use the same rising shed drafts.

So what exactly did I do "wrong'? I switched which set of lamms I tied to. I tied the upper (sinking) lamms to the O's in the draft which were supposed to be rising. My pattern was upside down. I probably could have let this go and simply pressed on with my weaving. I was having problems with my shed however (more on that next time), so I decided to re-tie the entire treadle tie-up. I've often said that I learn more from my mistakes than from getting it right the first time. Believe me when I say that I won't do that again.

So there you have it. Looking on the bright side I have to say that I'm learning a lot.

Next ....... Adjusting the Shed

© 9 July 2007 at http://leighsfiberjournal.blogspot.com

Related posts:
New Loom
Why A Countermarche?
Warping the Glimakra:
.....Adjusting the Loom With Texsolv
.....Winding On the Warp
.....Threading
.....Tying Up the Treadles
.....Adjusting the Shed