Lions and Tigers and Pears, oh my! [Scarf 31]

Oh, scarf 31
Why were you so difficult?
At last you are done!

Ahem. Sorry about that - I've been in a haiku frame of mind tonight, as anyone who's following my tweets may have spotted already. :) That pretty well sums things up, though: I had all kinds of problems with today's scarf. I persevered and got it done - and it turned out very well ifIdosaysomyself - but I did have problems, yessir I did.

Chief among these was procrastination, I confess, but some were entirely out of my hands. For instance, not long after I finally settled down to weave the power went out. Given that my loom is in the basement and that the basement has no windows to speak of and that I'd waited until evening to start on the scarfa, this presented a significant problem. It also threw a bit of a wrench into supper. :P

Fortunately, the power came back on after a hour or two and, after finally getting something warm to eat, I headed back downstairs. Everything went tickety boo for a while and then, about 20" in, I advanced my warp and lo! My tension went totally pearshaped. Pearshaped is good in pears and pretty cute in house cats (tho' maybe not lions and tigers) but it is not a desirable quality in warp tension.


Hard to tell in this pic but over there on the right the picks are waving up and down like the crowd at a baseball game. This resulted in a fair amount of hair pulling and even a bit of mild cursing but then I pulled out my handy dandy tension fixer upper, i.e. a dowel put under just those threads that had somehow gotten looser than the rest, and all was well.


It slowed things down a bit, having to push the dowel back into place each time I advanced, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm not sure exactly what happened to the tension; I thought at first it was because of the gaps in the warp but then I realized that I didn't actually put the gaps in while winding on. Maybe it's just the sparseness of the threads on the back beam. Any thoughts?

Anyhoo, with tension problems solved, I carried on and everything went well, albeit slowly, until I wound the last pirn and hit a plethora of knots, slubs, kinks and all manner of weirdness in the thread. Not quite sure what happened at the mill when the spool was wound, but I suspect it had something to do with pears...

And then the darned things got into my knee as well - why my knee would hurt tonight after only a few hours of weaving following many days' break, I cannot say. Perhaps it wants me to weave more? That must be it.

The final obstacles: fatigue and wandering attention. I hoped to combat these by listening to WeaveCast but alas! it was offline when I went to start the podcast I wanted to listen to. More pears! Fortunately, it came back almost right away and kept me company as I finished the rest of this troublesome - yet very pretty, I think! - scarfa.


I've been feeling like a real scarfa-slacker the past couple weeks so it's a big relief to actually have one to post today. Okay, so technically it's tomorrow on my coast already but it's still today (yesterday?) on the west coast, right? Right!

And, since I mentioned them, here are some completely non-weaving related lions and tigers for your consumption.¹ They are silly, mind numbingly repetitious and almost entirely factually inaccurate - and I like them. :)


1. Free snorkel with every visit!