Struggle and Organization

Getting back to my loom has been a big challenge - I've faced big troubles every step of the way.

Preparing the warp

I decided to have a color gradient with 2 colors in the warp, and it seemed like the easiest way to do that would be to wind bouts in each of the colors, then sley the reed at my kitchen table to get the color order. Wrong! This was a nightmare for oh so many reasons - let's just say I had a tangled mess to deal with (in spite of choke ties, and lease sticks for each color.)

F2B or B2F?

My plan was to thread the loom front to back - threading from the back of the loom using the sleyed threads in order, then beam. At the loom, I realized that my loom doesn't have enough room to thread from the back. (A friend later told me she warps F2B, but does the threading from the front of the loom. Wish I'd thought of that!) My decision was to go ahead and beam, then thread, then resley the reed.

Beaming the warp

I've got a sectional beam, so I figured I could put the sleyed reed in the beater and then tie on 1 inch sections and beam the warp. In theory, that is correct. Being rusty, I made some poor choices. I figured I could beam a little, go to the front of the loom and pull on each section to tension, then beam some more. (In retrospect, I should have found my trapeze and beamed the warp with weights keeping good tension.)  By the time I had the warp fully beamed, I went around to the back and discovered, to my horror, that some sections had looped around pegs.  I decided I'd thread, sley, then pull the full warp forward and rebeam it more carefully.

Threading and Sleying

Thank heavens at least this part went easily. I hung lease sticks behind the castle, and got the threading and sleying done fairly quickly.

Rebeaming

Then the fun began. Pulling the warp forward was a mess - I had so many tangles to deal with. (Frequent thought at the time - "Have I ever done this before?!") This time, I opted to add some warp sticks as I beamed, which helped.

Weaving

But wait, the fun wasn't over. I laced the warp onto the cloth beam and started weaving, only to discover that for some reason, I was losing tension in some sections. So I cut out what had been woven so far, and went ahead and tied onto the cloth apron rod. Better. I was happy to discover that my old laptop with the serial USB adapter talked to the dobby just fine. And I expected everything to go smoothly after that. Yeah right. Murphy was still lurking.

Frequently, the wrong shafts were lifting, and trying to unweave was challenging. Most of the time I just cut out wefts and tried again. I emailed Bob Keates (developer of Fiberworks PCW) and he kindly sent me info on things to check with the dobby knife. I spent one day trying to get the cords for that adjusted correctly. (I bought this loom secondhand from a weaver with much more experience than me - I had assumed it was assembled correctly.) I still kept running into problems, so it finally dawned on me that I had the first Mac version of the software on my old laptop - maybe it would help to update, which I did. Voila - that made a huge difference. Unfortunately, I did that near the end of a very frustrating project.

Other Issues

Summer & Winter Butterflies

I meant it when I said I had trouble EVERY STEP of the way.  I was weaving butterflies (baby blanket) and as I got to the pattern part, I realized that my choice of sett (5/2 16EPI) and weft (5/2) was giving the wrong aspect ration - the butterflies were slightly squashed. Luckily, I found a cone of 3/2 and tried that, which worked fairly well, until I ran out about 3/4 of the way through the blanket.


As I reached the end of the warp, the dobby suddenly stopped working, and I discovered that one of the cords to the dobby knife had frayed and broken. I have no idea why. One of the fly shuttle cords also frayed, and is close to breaking. So those both need to be repaired.

It has been hot and muggy here lately, so to persist with each problem as it arose took a massive amount of willpower, and I'm proud of myself for hanging in there. I suspect that I will NOT be giving this baby blanket to the new mom I was weaving it for - I'll have to do it all over again, but this time, hopefully things will be a whole lot easier.

Hang Totes

On a good note, when I got frustrated and needed to stop for a while, I did some more loom room reorganization. One of the things I did that tickled me was to find a good place to store my favorite tote bags. They are fairly bulky, so they don't store well on shelves or in drawers. I realized that the perfect spot for them would be hanging on the support brace for my worktable, on the back side. (I've got 2 Ikea Alex drawer units on the other side of the brace under the table.  I bought some S hooks on Amazon.com, and I really think this worked out well.

Lessons Learned

There are a number of lessons I learned, and the struggle was painful enough that I'm not likely to forget them soon.

•  It's probably easier to fuss with color changes when winding the warp, rather than when sleying the reed.
• While it is possible to beam a regular warp on a sectional beam, it would have been MUCH easier to do what I usually do, which is to beam each 1 inch section at a time.
• Yeah, I know - don't try to launch into a project right away, especially when you are rusty. Sample, sample, sample. 

The good part? Not long ago, I avoided my loom room like the plague, because it was a cluttered mess that just made me feel guilty. Now - it is beautifully organized and a joy to spend time there. And in spite of all of the troubles, I am hanging in there. I WILL get to a point where weaving is peaceful and easy again, I promise myself.