Refusing to quit

After my last post I went off and looked over my notes to make sure I was remembering the dance properly. I wasn't, and it's a good thing I checked. But then the first time I tried to weave again another thread broke.

I admit it: I walked away again.

Ever since then I've been trying to think analytically about the project. Why is it so hard for me to just get back in there, fix the broken threads, and go back to weaving?

Some of my reluctance comes from the general lack of energy I've had to devote to anything other than interpersonal activity with my family this year. We really have faced unprecedented challenges. All right, acknowledge and move on. What else?

Partly the quality control geek inside me is having conniptions at all the repairs I'm having to do. After all this effort and expense, she says, what am I going to have to show for it? If I'm lucky, I'll have an indifferently made piece that is proof of concept rather than art. The quality control geek is never satisfied with imperfect work; I spend a lot of time squelching her so I can hear the muse a little more clearly. Lately I haven't had enough energy to squelch her, and so I was stuck in a bad place where the work just seemed like it was a case of diminishing returns.

But then the other night ὁ πάτρων (Il Patron) came for a visit. He wasn't there to visit the loom; it was purely a social call, and we all had a really good time watching "Jason and the Argonauts" in memory of Ray Harryhausen. Still, at one point he asked about my progress. Then I watched him walk over to it and gently touch the web. He looked at it with this combination of wonder and longing in his eyes. That right there, that is my antidote to the voice of the inner quality control geek. I had forgotten about the magic in this undertaking, and he reminded me about it without saying anything. OK, great; I'm over the hump of mid-project dejection. What else?

Well, after I got past the "this project sucks" moment, there were really only three other problems I could articulate. They all have to do with the tapestry woven portion of the project.

All my experience with tapestry weaving up to this point has been with small pieces. The piece on my tapestry loom right now, which is half done, is only about 6.5"x13". While I've become very comfortable estimating how much dyed weft I'll need for a project of that size or smaller, I really haven't even been able to face the fact that I have no clue how much dyed weft I'll need for the chiton band. Yesterday, though, an answer came to me: I will apply my mad math skillz!

The piece currently on my tapestry loom required me to dye four one-ounce skeins of weft. The weft I am using is a known quantity, and I've been working with it for years. Since I am more or less at the halfway point in that tapestry right now, all I have to do is weigh the unused balls of weft to find out (roughly) how much weft I've used so far. If I double that, I'll have how much weft is going to be required for the whole piece, i.e., 169 square inches of tapestry. Now, since I already ascertained that the tapestry section of the chiton will be at approximately the same sett as the other tapestry project, I just need to apply that math. I am planning for a band that goes from selvedge to selvedge and will be about 8" long, so I estimate that to be about 585 square inches of tapestry. That means I'll need about three and a half times as much weft for the chiton project as I do for the smaller piece. (Call it four, insists my inner quality control geek.)

Earlier today I went into the dining room to sit down at the table with some coffee and calculate these numbers. I was all excited about getting to do some good geeky textile math. But when I got there, the loom was staring at me forlornly. Was I going to have fun without it, right in front of it? So I decided to take my desire to do this math, to solve this problem, and let the doing of it be my reward for solving the prior problem of the broken warp thread.

Remember that broken thread? I mentioned it at the top of the entry. I fixed it this morning. And then I fixed six more that broke after it. I had to re-knit a heddle and unweave two passes too. But I finally got it all squared away. I wove two passes, a there-and-back-again, without anything breaking. It even looks pretty good considering how much the warp has been stressed lately.

Then I came in here to blog about my progress, which led sneakily to my doing the math live, in real time as I blogged about why it had been a problem. (I suppose that makes this a meta post too.) But I've still got two more points to make.

Another thing that worried me was dyestuffs. I knew I would be using two dyestuffs, one of which is in limited supply because I grew it myself. Yesterday I went looking for dyestuffs in the projects cabinet, the place where we keep all the weird raw materials: jet, soapstone, bone, beeswax, lamp black, calcium carbonate, dried herbs, oils, dyestuffs, that kind of stuff. I found plenty enough alum and dyestuffs to complete a pretty big project. And now that I know the actual size of the yarn pile I'll need to dye, I can relax. I have about twice as much dyestuff available as I will need for this project.

Now I finally have enough information that I can see my path forward, not just on the plain weaving but on the tapestry part. There's a lot of busy work involved in getting the yarn dyed. I can use busy work to progress with the project even on those days when I can't bring myself to weave. But hopefully I've solved enough of the technical problems that the weaving process isn't going to be difficult until I get to the beginning of the tapestry section.

Mustn't think about that yet, though. That's the last problem, the only thing I haven't even got a provisional solution for yet. Maybe I'll find a way to get ahold of the article I need to help me solve the riddle of the transition section.

The dance continues

(Warning: this one is very geeky.)

The piece is more than 25% woven now; last night we turned the cloth beam again. Another turn and it will be time to unchain and lengthen the warp.

Draw-in is now visible and obvious, since the recently woven web is now wound over a layer of previously woven web. It's about 1" narrower at each side now. I'm not worried about this from a construction viewpoint, because I figured in a 10% draw-in when I was making calculations. But it does mean the top corners of the chiton will have a slightly trapezoidal effect. Hopefully nobody will be looking at the top edge anyway.

During this recent period when I wasn't weaving on a regular basis, something happened to my understanding of the dance. I've now hit on a sequence that is a great deal faster than the previous ones I tried. I've just about doubled my most recently clocked speed for a "there and back again" pass. Now it only takes two and a half minutes rather than five.

Here's what I'm currently doing. I wrap the left selvedge, then put the penion through the natural shed. I use the comb to loosely beat the weft into place, still on the open shed. Then I wrap the right selvedge, and here's where it gets a little tricky. With my left hand I pull and hold the sinister (rightmost) shed rod. I place the penion on the natural shelf formed by the heddles. With my right hand I take the weaving sword and draw it through the countershed, clearing any sticky yarns. Then I put the sword under my left arm, pick up the penion, and put it through the countershed. I drop the first shed rod, move to my left, and repeat the process with the second shed rod. Then I move back to the sinister edge of the warp, drawing the tip of the sword across the threads as I go as if I were using a pin beater. This helps the countershed fall back into place so the original, natural shed is clear again.

I beat in sequence from the sinister selvedge. Holding the handle of the sword in my right hand, I put the blade in the natural shed at about a 45 degree angle to the fell, with the hilt nearest the fell at the selvedge edge. Then I lever the point of the sword upward with my left hand. When the flat of the sword meets the fell, I push up gently, just until I feel the weights moving. Then I step to my left and repeat the process. It takes from four to six such movements to cross the entire warp, depending on how the weft thread lies.

You'll notice here that in both passes I am beating from the attached toward the free end of the weft. This is a trick I learned while weaving rutevev tapestries. I usually use my free hand to adjust the weft tension while I beat in this fashion. Managing the tension in this fashion helps me produce cleaner, straighter selvedges with less draw-in than any other method I've tried. Beating this way adds some walking to the process, because it means I have to cross the loom (from dexter to sinister) twice: once after passing the second weft and again after I've beaten to leave the sword at the sinister end of the loom. However, the speed I gain by not having to manipulate the sheds as much more than makes up for it.

Besides, the weavers of the Classical literature all walked up and down at their looms. Next I should work on being able to sing as I go.

Starting to get the hang of this

There is a noticeable area of completed web visible on the loom now; I've done one-sixteenth of the length. Along the way I've started to develop some rhythms, some ergonomics, what I think of as "the dance." Every different weaving project has its own dance steps, although there are families of projects just as there are families of dance steps.

This weaving project is a little bit more stately and elaborate than some, more a pavane than The Hustle. I'm clocking one pair of wefts (a There and Back Again, if you will) every five minutes. There is a great deal faster and easier than Back Again!

But there is plenty of dance floor left upon which I may become more proficient at these steps, as I hope I will. My speed already seems blindingly fast compared to how I was doing the same things last week.

The everlasting warping process

I'm now tackling the task that I dreaded. Out of every skill associated with this project, the only thing I hadn't actually done before was lash an entire shed of the warp to a stationary shed rod. I had no trouble figuring out how I wanted to work the lashing. It took some thinking to figure out how I wanted to keep it even: I decided to just go ahead and mark the rod. It took me even longer to work up the nerve to try it.

So first I began lashing the warp ends in groups of three. After an inch I got brave and tried groups of two, then finally tried lashing every warp end. I can do it! It's very fiddly at this sett, and the bobbins I'm using to hold my thread are less than optimal. I'm using 4" boat shuttle bobbins; I'd prefer using tapestry bobbins but don't have any.

I finished 5" of lashing and had to take a break because my eyes and threads were crossing so much! Instead, I finished weighing all my new loomweights.

The new weights range in weight from 193 to 224 grams apiece. Most of them (87 of the 120) weigh somewhere between 207 and 216 grams. There's one extreme outlier at 193 grams, and a nearly perfectly matched pair at the heavy end that I've earmarked for the selvedges.

I expect that lashing the shed will go somewhat like lacing the header band. Sooner or later I'll figure out a really quick, simple, ergonomically superior way to do it and it'll go smoothly. Until that point, I'm going to be pretty twitchy.

More on warp stats

Well, I was right that my warping would get faster. I noticed after the first 18" or so that I had noticeably quickened. Near the end of the warp I timed myself again and found that it was only taking me 5:15 to do an inch of warp, as opposed to the 7:45 it had taken earlier.

I picked up speed partly because I found a better way of ascertaining how many loops I'd done. It proved impractical for me to count to twelve while I was doing the loops; instead I would stop and check, either by eye or by actually touching the threads, to see if the proper number were there. After I learned the most efficient place to look, I didn't have to touch the threads to count them, which picked me up some speed. I also got better at the peg-wrapping sequence. But mostly I think it was the mood music that helped, since the improvement in speed happened on the first day I began listening to music while working.

I timed how long it took me to advance the warp of the header band: approximately 1:30. I figure I advanced it about once for every six inches of band woven. So if I advanced the band warp about a dozen times that makes 18 minutes of advancing the warp.

I'm going to call that as an overall time of about seven and a half, maybe eight hours to weave the header band all by myself on equipment I'd never used in that way before.

As I was weaving the header band, my gauge slackened just a tiny bit. Where I should have finished with 72 sets of warp bundles, I have only 69. (Surely this number is the Cypriot's way of laughing at me, or perhaps blessing my patron.) That works out to be a sett of 23 ends per inch rather than the 24 I was aiming for, but I don't think that's a problem.

I'm more concerned about possible take-up, but I factored in a 10% take-up in both directions. My other warp-weighted loom experience suggests that there'll be a greater than 10% take-up in the weftwise direction, but I am hoping it won't be greater than 14% because then the garment might be too small to fit properly. And after all, my experience has been with weft yarns that were woolen spun, not worsted spun. As long as I don't get too much draw-in, the take-up shouldn't be a problem. That's what the big beefy Navajo warp singles yarn is for: chunky selvedge reinforcements to keep the web from drawing in markedly. And if the finished piece doesn't have a lot of draw-in and take-up, so much the better; it'll fit a little more graciously that way.

Whew!

Done! The header band is completely woven. It's just a smidgen shy of 72" long, incorporating 1660 warp ends: 828 loops plus four thicker ends for reinforced selvedges.

The yarn behaved very well. It's really strong but fine, smooth instead of hairy. I did not have any breakages, fewer than six tangles, and no knots that I could detect in the entire warping process.

That is one very big pile of yarn, over 13 ounces worth. Many of the bundles have unchained themselves most of the way due to that lovely smooth texture. It's really kind of a tangly mess right now. But I'm very excited and at the same time even more scared. The project is a little more real now.

Next step will be to secure it to the loom.

Geeky stats post

I wove another 8" of header band today. Since I'm still sore from that fall last week, I've been doing it in shorter sessions rather than settling down to do one long session. This has meant the weaving setup has lived on my dining table all day today, but I'm good with that. I'd rather be able to come and go right now.

Have been having some equipment -- well, not failures, just problems. The improvised warping board keeps coming unclamped. I have shored it up with better clamps and some ties; that should keep it from slipping any more. The frame loom was giving me tension problems which made advancing the band warp slow and annoying. I worked out a different way to use the tension device, by adding a dowel to the process. Later on I will probably post a photo of the rig; there's still plenty of time for me to fine-tune it some more before I see the end of this warp.

I'm still getting gauge without thinking about it much, but this yarn is so fine I expect I'll probably be a couple of inches off by the time I get to the titular end of it. That's okay; I'll just add some more warp. I would like my calculations and gauge to be brilliantly accurate, but I'm willing to admit they likely aren't.

I thought I should probably time myself and see how long it takes to crank out the header band. I'll measure twice more: somewhere near the middle of the band and somewhere right before the end. Maybe I'll get faster at this after having done a yard or two of it.

Right now I'm grouping the band weft/warp ends in 12-loop bunches, one per inch. (That's a sett of 24 epi.) First I pull a warp loop through the header band as weft; I walk it to my dining room wall, pull out about another foot of length, and then return to my warping pegs. I wind the loop around the set of warping pegs in the assigned order, keeping a finger between the two threads so they're always in the right relationship. I change the shed, beat the band with a finger of my right hand, and pull the next loop. After I finish 12 of these loops, I change the shed again. I beat the last loop into the band, then pull out my measuring stick to make sure I've got gauge. Then I put my hand in the cross, separate the halves of the warp, and tie a slip knot in the front half of the warp. Then I chain the whole bundle to make it more manageable, then I toss it toward the other end of the table away from the weaving process.

That entire process takes approximately 7:45. It includes occasional adjustments of gauge or of the tension of a weft loop at the non-warp side of the header band, i.e., across what will be the top when the warp is put on the loom.

So at this point I'm taking seven minutes and 45 seconds to create one inch of header band/warp. Next time I have to advance the band warp, I'll time that and turn it into a geeky textile statistic too.

Because it's all about the geeky stats, right?