Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Progress

This little cardwoven band will be the handle on my travel carry bag:

band

It is reeled silk, painted with Lanaset dyes, with a cotton weft. It's coming out well, I like it, it will work.

But it has caused me fits. It is a threaded in pattern. I first set it up on a small loom. After weaving an inch or so, I decided I wanted the borders to rotate continuously forward, making a tidy edge. So, I unwound the warp from the small loom, and set up the center section on a c-clamp, with the borders weighted separately.

Well, this worked for about another inch. The tension was too wonky (technical weaving term), so we went to Plan C. I set it up for the third time, still midstream during the weaving process, on my floor loom, winding the center section on the warp beam, and dropping the weighted edge threads over the back beam.

I wove for another inch (we can see we have a total of 3 inches and several hours here, right?). Well, at this point, I gave up on the separate rotation for the edges, and decided to weave them all as a pack.

Why? Well, the tension *still* was uneven. The center section has cards rotating variably in both directions as it is, and with the edge warps rotating only one direction, the tension overall was too funky. I think it might be my eclectic collection of weights: a motley crew of fishing weights and jars of pennies.

I will try this again, starting from the outset on the floor loom, with a set of evenly matched weights. But for now, for this band, I'm just going to weave away.

1 Comments:

Blogger Sara said...

Aha! Thank you Michael! I'll try that. It makes sense, just a little blip, rather than a full width blip.

11:38 AM  

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