May 6, 2022

Estimating yarn usages while doing inventory on my stash. Not sure if I’m getting it all right. The blanket weighs 1011g and the leftovers bag 150g

Total estimated usage is 14.27 skeins = 1427g
I suspect it’s a bit less.

I’m going to set up a twill blanket with my ‘passion colours’ (reds, purples, fuchsias and oranges) without a plan, randomly mixing colours in the warp.

Colour crafter Gent shared with Rozeta

May 15, 2021

Finished the first warp section. It’s a new warping board for me (Ashford small). I decided on a regular cross at the top and a counting cross at the bottom, just for the warping, changing every 10 threads.

Since it’s a double width weave the threads I’m warping now are going to be alternating between the top and bottom layer. I warped parts with one color and parts with two. Not sure yet how I’ll divide those between the layers, I’m just going with what feels right. Same for when I changed colors. I didn’t split the doubles on the cross, so the cross contains single and double threads. We’ll see if that gives any problems. I’m use Jane Stanford’s online guild videos as a guide.

Given that I need 540 ends and how much the warping board can comfortable hold with this yarn, each warp section will be 70 ends, so 8 sections.

May 17, 2021

I’m halfway done with the warp sections but I just realized watching the warping videos back that I tied on at the cross end and that will make it really hard to put it on the apron rod…. I’ll tie on at the other and for the rest of the warp, let’s hope I can figure out how to make it work with the first sections….

May 23, 2021

Finished the warp last Wednesday. Had intended to spend this weekend winding and threading. Of course plans don’t always pan out exactly. Thankfully it’s Whit weekend so I have another day.

First off I had to do some moving around to put the loom in a place where I’d have room to wind the warp. Then I realized the raddle I have only has 60cm of screw eyes, while my warp is supposed to be 65cm wide (double width). The whole thing is 70cm wide and there is room to add some more so I had to go to the hardware store. Then I was looking up info on the warp rod that is shown in the Warping instructions for the Jane but is not supplied with the Jane, as it turns out there is some info here about that, and it being readily available at hardware stores. Thankfully these days you can check stock online so I could get these things in one trip.

So I have some DIYing to do (add screw eyes to the raddle and sawing the rod to size) before I can start spreading the warp.

May 26, 2021

Oh dear. Little mistakes kept piling up, and then winding the warp happened…. let’s just say it didn’t go well.

As I mentioned in my last note my raddle wasn’t wide enough. To add insult to injury I had miscalculated the number of ends I needed for 65cm (x2 for double width) and had enough for 70cm. I really don’t want to go all the way to the limit of this loom on such an adventurous project on a loom I’ve done only a handful of projects on. So I had to fudge in a few extra cm’s on the raddle and take off some of the last warp segment. I decided to take that part off, put it back on the warping frame, to take off the threads I wouldn’t need. That all went pretty well, but then the winding on. I was sweating, I was nervous, with 8 warp segments to keep in line and I missed a lot. One major issue is that the lease sticks would not move through the warp. I only figured this out after I missed the fact that the cross was being rolled on and the threads that were supposed to keep the lease sticks in place had snapped. So I had to take the cross out. Then during rolling on the warp I wasn’t paying enough attention to outer ends, I hadn’t made sure everything was centered and I hadn’t applied the trick I did on the sample, which was to have some threads going from the front beam to the back beam through the read at the warp width, which would keep the warp from splaying out wider, at least at the back beam. Then my BF who was helping me noticed that some threads seemed to be bunging up at the raddle. The problem with this raddle is that the screw eyes are screwed in so that the eyes are the only part that are visible, and the openings are not all on the same side, so the threads can snag on those. So I need a new raddle for this project (the built in raddle is even more unsuitable for this reason which I had discovered during the sample project).

After a good cry I decided I wasn’t going to take on this mess and start over. The warp segments were still clear enough to separate, of course my cross was lost, so I’d have to wind everything up again and redo the whole warp process.

Enter my 6 year old second hand wool winder (a Royal, apparently a quite sought after discontinued model, but missing the bobbin) which I hadn’t used so far, and a couple of empty TP rolls. Oh this makes this process so much sweeter!

June 10, 2021

Finally finished the redo of winding the warp yesterday. Two sections I had to redo, one where I forgot to secure one of the crosses, then another where I’d messed up the color order to be consistent with the section before and after it.

The wool winder made a big difference in this process, winding the warp from the cakes it produced was completely painless (apart from the couple of times I attempted to keep one of the pairings of two colors from the first attempt, lots of twisting. Note to self: always wind single threads on a cake!) and using the winder to untangle the first attempt made it a lot less stressful than it would have been by hand, even fun!

Whenever I had a pairing I would wind one color on the (TP) bobbin, I unwound one or two lengths from the original warp which was draped over the warping board, then separate the two colors by splitting them across my legs and taking them apart, leaving a little pile on either side of me, making sure that I had the end of the color I wasn’t winding at the time somewhere I could find it. Then when I was finished with the first color I’d start winding the second from that end. Or if they ended at the same time. I would use the latter end of the second color, which meant the pile was in ‘the right direction’, i.e. the end was not coming from underneath it.

The warp is now spread neatly in my new DIY raddle. I’ve also secured some cotton thread at 70cm width through the reed from the front beam to the back beam, with a thread across that keeps it at about 68-69cm wide, which will hopefully help the outer ends not spilling off. I’m also thinking about adding a couple of chipboard discs on the warp beam to keep things straight, perhaps with a cardboard tube on the outside to ensure the right width.

June 12, 2021

I was determined to take it slow with beaming but I got into a bit of a frenzy with it anyway. I looked around the house for things that could act as weights for each of the 8 sections and I managed to find 2 dumbells and 6 packages of clay of the same weight, which I tied to each section using a bag with handles.

Once I had all the weights tied on and I saw it was going well I got that ‘got to finish now’ bug. I guess I felt nervous about leaving the tension on for too long.

I tried using texsolv cord as bumpers on the warp beam as a ‘flange’ (as I learned from the ever so helpful Warped Weavers forum) was difficult given that the apron cord, apron rod wand warp rod would be in the way.

The biggest issue was with the paper. It is 70cm wide, the same width as the warp and of course it’s never going to go exactly straight so I ran into trouble, cut the paper a couple of times and started again, but the outer ends still spilled off. At some point, probably about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way in I added some of the sticks that came with the loom which are wider than 70cm.

With hindsight, and what I might have realized if I hadn’t done this in such a frenzied state, is that it would have been best if I’d cut off lengths of about 76cm of paper, and fed those in sideways. It didn’t really occur to me that you don’t have to have one roll of paper going in….

I’m slightly tempted to start over again somehow but I’m not going to do it from scratch and it’s never going to be absolutely perfect. I’ll just find the ends that are loose and hang some s hooks from them until the tension gets back to where it should be.

The rest of the warp went on a dream.

I started off with 700g of weight per section, the clay/dumbell and a solid glass tealight holder per section. This was already quite difficult to wind on, so after a while I removed the tealight holder and continued with 500g. When I was getting near the end it was almost impossible to keep cranking with the weight on so I did crank and yank for the last bit and wound until the cross ties got up to the raddle. Then I finally took a break.

July 5, 2021

Threading done, sleying done and started weaving

For threading I chose to move 4 heddles per shaft at a time.I tied a slip knot in every 1-8 group (threading is 1,8,2,7,3,6,4,5) It got tricky around where the shaft handles are, I could only see the cross properly if the shafts were lifted which meant the handles were down and in the way.

For sleying I used the same trick I did on the sample, lift shafts 1 and 8, 2 and 7 and so on to identify the pairs that would go through the same dent. I thought this would also ensure any threading errors would show themselves (the last pair of each group I didn’t need to lift the shafts for obviously but I still checked if they lifted as expected) but if you’ve threaded below the eye instead of through the eye, it seems like the thread is still lifted when not under tension, so I found out when I was 10cm in that 2 threads of the lower layer were floating below everything else. I undid the knots they were in, fixed the threading and tied back on. I will needle weave them in when it’s off the loom.

I found a tip about hemming after the work is off the loom, using a header of slippery thread (I used perle cotton), then the number of picks you want to hem (2 in my case), then one more pick of the slippery thread and then start the regular weaving.

My beat was a bit gappy at first. When I found those wrongly threaded ends I almost decided to start over but I’m taking it as a learning experience.

I am now beating on the next shed instead of a closed shed. It’s still confusing me sometimes when I have to change the shafts instead of lowering them all and then go to the next combination, but I’m getting the hang of it. Advancing often.

My weighted temple needs a lot of weight and is also pulling down the cloth as the side supports on the Jane are lower than the breast beam, but I’m going to see if I can use the same method I saw here to have a thread going from the back to the front to hold up the temple, if that works at all at this width.

August 19, 2021

Been weaving away and not updating this page much.

The weaving came off the loom on August 10. The weaving between hem picks was 214cm on the loom. I was worried I might not make 200 so I was happy with a little extra. I could have probably gotten another 10cm out of it before getting issues with the shed but I didn’t want to risk it.

There were several issues and considerations I’ve had to deal with during the course of weaving.

Floating selvedge
Because of the nature of a twill pattern the outer threads on the open side of the top and bottom layer are not caught. To fix this and prevent draw in I used floating selvedges on both layers. I followed the suggestion of this link to lift the top selvedge with a thread tied to the top of the loom.

Nose dives

Nose dives started happening in the bottom layer after about 90cm. I tried the ‘weighted rod’ method but with warp separator sticks since I don’t have a spare rod, but it seemed to make things worse.

When advancing the warp, go to the back of the loom and tighten the tension at the warp beam. Separate the top and bottom layer threads at the back to move twists to the back beam by lifting the top layer shafts, then use hands to lift the top threads and push down the bottom threads (rather than ‘beating’ a hand through)

Also make sure you throw straight, parallel to the reed and the warp. In the end I managed to get through the whole warp without having to resort to drastic measures.

I very briefly tried increasing the tension on the bottom layer by lifting it and putting my old raddle in against the back beam, but I quickly saw that was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

Cloth path

Because of the nose dives I started thinking about the reason the bottom layer has less tension the further you go in the project. The cloth goes around the breast beam and cloth beam in such a way that the top layer always has the longest path. Together with the fell line of the beater on the Jane, which angles such that it hits the bottom layer first, this just causes a lot of issues. Lower tension in the bottom layer is going to be more tricky in terms of nose dives than when the top layer has less tension, since the bottom layer is still holding things up. So what I want to try on my next double width project is to assemble the stand in such a way that the ratchet is on the other side, meaning the cloth beam will turn the other way, which means the bottom layer will be the outer layer there. The path around the breast beam will still be longest for the top layer, which should compensate a bit.

Despite my little mirror I still had a number of skips in the bottom layer. Not a huge amount. I think about 6-8. There were also loops that I tried spreading out but it’s still quite noticeable after wet finishing. The edges aren’t too pretty. I may consider bias edges but I might just leave it.

I decided on twisted fringe, and after a little calculation (4 ends per fringe, 560 ends on each side, 140 fringes per side, 280 fringes total I quickly decided on getting me a fringe twister at Spinspul. Such a nifty tool! I’ll post one more update when I’m done twistin’