Argh! Sloppy mistakes are the hold-up. Firstly, I discovered warp thread counting errors. Of the purple warp section, I only had 86 of the required 96 ends. Of the green I had 10 extra ends, and of the navy, 4 extra. And these were even with marking off my warp in bundles of ten as I measured it on the warping board. I blame cats for this. I have two that are very nagging demanding when it comes to their personal needs. Fortunately, the shortage was in the first section, so I could just added 10 more ends at the edge of the warp. Unfortunately, it meant re-threading the heddles for the entire section. Where I had extra warp ends, I could just set them aside. But I had to re-sley to fill in the gaps.
Next, I discovered sleying errors as I threaded the heddles. One was a skipped dent, the second was a doubled dent. For these, I'm blaming my glasses. Bifocals are good for some things, but for others they are a nuisance. Better lighting and a different chair helped here.
Then I found a threading error. I was surprised at this because I thread in sections and check the threading before moving on the the next section. It was because of those extra navy warp threads that I discovered this error. I re-checked my threading as I counted ends and discovered the error. This one must have been due to a distraction, although what that was, I can't recall. Either cats or husband, but it was caught and fixed before I started weaving!
All of these were frustrating because they were avoidable, but I managed them anyway. Finally, I'm ready to tie and tension the warp.
Of course, as I work I think. I had to decide about what to use for my tabby weft, and settled on using the warp colors for the tabby too, rotating the color with each motif section. In thinking about how it would look, I tried to conquer the math. I have five warp colors and three pattern weft colors. So five tabby colors would add some interesting color play. When I diagrammed it, it looked like this . . .
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| click to enlarge |
The nutshell version is that by rotating through my pattern and tabby weft colors, I could get 15 rows of my window motif before the color combinations would repeat. And this got me thinking about weaving dishtowels. I could weave two dishtowels, each with its own color variations. Or, I could weave something else.
I decided I want to weave through the entire 15 color sections, which means I'll probably start calling this a table runner instead of dishtowels. I have enough warp measured out to do this, and I find this idea much more fascinating that my original plan.
In the end, this project is as much about color exploration as it is trying out crackle on opposites. But then, all my projects boil down to that. Color is always the factor that fascinates me and keeps my interest. How it blends and how it can be manipulated presents the most interesting experimentation.
Hopefully, there will be no more delays, and I'll have some weaving to show you soon.
