Stubborn as an Ox [Scarf #35]

Last week I said I was lazy and that this was the root of all the trouble I had with Scarf #34, the ScarfFAIL. This is true, really, since it was sheer laziness that kept me from cutting and tying in the first place. Really, though, my main fault is stubbornness: once I'd decided to be lazy I was definitely going to stay the course and see it through come hell or high water ... or bad tension or wooshing pop bottles. ;) Comes from being a bull-headed Taurus born in the Year of the Ox, as I've said before.

Today I exhibited that same determined stubbornness by finishing Scarf #34. Yes, that's right: refreshed from a weekend during which I didn't even glance at the loom, I sat down and wove that hummer as long as I could. I think it wound up about 63" long and, apart from a skipped thread near the end that I can fix easily, it doesn't look all that bad. I certainly don't expect it to be sellable but hey, I'd wear it. Or maybe Mom will. Moms are so good for that, aren't they?¹

Just so you can see what I was up against, this pic shows the difference in tension between those crammed 2/8s and the rest of the 4/8 warp:

See those 2/8s floating way above the rest?

Today I did the sensible thing (well, once #34 was done, that is!) and cut the finished scarves off and retied. I considered a few different wefts for the last scarf on the warp: the same green as the ScarfFAIL but in a 4/8 rather than 2/8, the dark blue that appears in the warp in only one tiny stripe, even a beige boucle... but in the end I let Barbara's approval of Scarf #33 guide me and went with a light blue. I was uncertain after the first couple inches but by the time I had 8" or so woven I really liked it.


Isn't it funny how that goes? I used to weave an inch or two to see if I liked a colour and then would unweave results I didn't like. Eventually, though, I realized that an inch or two is not nearly enough to judge a colour by so I usually go for at least 8" or 10" before being really dissatisfied, by which time it's too late for stubborn ol' me to give up. I don't worry too much about it since the colour combos I find most dodgy are usually some of the first things that sell each year.

I had to go slowly while weaving this scarf since those pesky 2/8s started getting tight almost right from the get go. I'd woven 1" worth of scarf, hemstitched and advanced one (1) time only and could already feel that they were tight. I managed to get about 30" woven before I had to resort to first one dowel and then a second to take up the slack on the other threads. Even so, I let them be far looser than I normally like my warps, so today was a good exercise in keeping my selvages even. I usually rely on the fairly high tension of the warp threads to keep the selvages even but I've found in recent years that high tension on the warp = harder to treadle = discomfort in my knee and hips. Ergo, I've been making a concerted effort lately to learn good habits that yield good selvages even on looser tension and these past couple scarves have certainly benefited from that.

I totally blanked on taking a Scarfadone! shot this time, so here's a pic of all three scarves from this warp once they're off the loom: Scarf #33 at the back, Scarf #34 in the middle, and today's scarf, #35, at the front.


Incidentally, I listened to Episode #9 of WeaveCast today while I was weaving and thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Bonnie Tarses. I've run across her blog in the past and found her horoscope weavings beautiful - like me, she's all about plain weave and colour. While I enjoyed listening to her views on design (all of her weaving carries a message of some kind) what I appreciated most were two things she said.

Firstly:

"It's impossible to weave something ugly. The reason why you think that what you've woven is ugly is because you had an idea, a plan in your head and what you wove fell far from the plan."

I have told my students this so many times I've lost count. They'll be disappointed with something they've woven and I tell them: "No one else can see the picture you had in your head of what this was going to look like. You know what you expected and are disappointed that this isn't it but to everyone else on the planet this is beautiful and impressive. Be proud of yourself!"

Bonnie then went on to say something else that was even better yet:

"Now, the way around that is to not have a plan in your head. The only plan is 'how wide you want it to be? how long do you want it to be?' and then what happens in the middle is what happens."

I can't tell you how gratifying it was to hear a Proper Weaver^(tm) give credence to this way of doing things! I have long followed exactly this lack-of-plan but have always felt a bit sheepish about it. I felt I ought to be more rigourous about planning my projects, that I ought to take more care, that I was being lazy or stubborn... it is So. Great. to hear a highly respected artist like Bonnie Tarses (who no one could possibly accuse of being lazy!) espouse this method of unplanning. I really would just rather wander into the yarn room each day and discover which yarns are going to speak to me at that moment than try to plan something in advance and impose my will upon them, as Bonnie put it.

Of course, having said all that, my next project will be doing exactly that: I shall impose my will upon the lovely tencel yarn that arrived on my doorstep last week and turn it into what I hope will be a gorgeous stole for a good family friend who is being ordained as a priest in a few weeks' time. The posts for the rest of this week and probably next week too will be all about my adventures in this regard.

Tomorrow: the very planned draft and possibly the wound warp!


1. Mine's got a shaft-switched rug I wove years ago that's as ugly as a very ugly thing that she not only uses, she even claims to like it! At least I can reassure myself that I've woven some far more lovely things for her over the years, too.

Scarf FAIL [Scarf 34]

Woooph. Where to begin? At the beginning, I guess.

I started out with pretty high hopes for this scarf. Was going to use my tried and true light green weft which almost always turns out well and which also happens to be in the warp so I knew it would work. No problems there. I also decided to use a 2/8 weft for the first time, like my dear ol' mum suggested a while back,¹ which also should have worked. And it was awfully pretty, ifIdosaysomyself, so that wasn't the problem.


The wobbly selvages weren't the problem either, although I admit they do look pretty bad. They are merely a symptom of the problem.

So what was the problem, you ask? When you come right down to it, the problem was me. I am basically lazy at heart, and this leads me into all manner of difficulty when I try to cut corners. ;)

Remember yesterday when I said that those narrow stripes of 2/8 crammed into a single dent in the reed were taking up at a different rate so I was going to have to cut and tie? Well, when I trundled downstairs today to start weaving, I didn't really feel like it. For some reason I thought that perhaps the 2/8 weft wouldn't create the same issues... what's more, I also had a momentary lapse of reason and decided the 2/8 would not only not make the tension worse, it would somehow miraculously fix the uneven tension I already had. And so I decided not to cut and tie but just to carry on and see how things went. This was my first mistake.

It rapidly became apparent that the 2/8 was not effecting any miracle cures for my tension so I was either going to have to take out what I had, start over and waste several inches of warp, or pull a tension fix out of thin air. Being basically lazy and also pretty cheap, I went with option #3. So I pulled out my handy-dandy tension fixer upper and bunged it under the loose threads again. However, since I was feeling particularly lazy today and didn't want to have to keep pushing it back every time I advanced, I pulled it all the way down to the warp beam and hung weights off of it so that it would stay. This essentially turned the whole shebang into a warp weighted loom, with the rod and the weights putting tension on most of the threads and the back beam tensioning those skinny stripes. Or so I thought. This was my second mistake.

What I hadn't considered was that, if the only thing putting tension on my threads was the weights, they had to be Pretty Darn Heavy in order to put more tension on than the loom itself could do. The little water bottles I usually use for heavy weights which work so well on a few ends at a time had no hope of putting enough tension on a full 7" of warp. So I exchanged them for 2L pop bottles instead.² My third mistake.

Spotted those loose yellow threads, did you? I'll get to those in a moment.

This arrangement worked a treat for several inches... true, the warp was still quite a bit looser than I'd have liked, hence the wobbly selvages, but it was working. Then, the third or fourth time I advanced the warp, disaster struck. I guess I normally just ease enough tension off the brake that I can pull the warp forward to advance but this time I gave the brake release a good ol' stomp and woooooooosh, those 2L bottles went crashing to the floor, taking a fair amount of my warp with them. But not taking those skinny threads, of course, since they weren't weighted. Those skinny threads weren't quite sure what to do with themselves as the warp beam unreeled itself, so they just kinda gathered up, looking a bit lost - rather like sheep waiting for a dog to herd them back into line.

"Huh," thought I. "Well, okay then." And, like a good little sheep dog, I wound the warp back up onto the beam. No harm done... and yet, for some reason, this made those skinny threads waaaay tighter than they had been to begin with. I still haven't quite figured that out... maybe because enough of the warp unreeled itself that the next roll of paper dividing the layers fell out? Maybe when I wound it back up, sans paper, those threads got futzed up somehow. Dunno.

Anyhoo, I eased off the tension on those threads (ugh, loose warp again!) and sat back down and kept weaving... everything seemed to be mostly okay and I figured any unevenness at the fell would probably just work itself out in the wash. Right? Sure. No problem.

And then it happened again. A couple of times. Yargh. By this point I had only two choices: give up, or go out to Tim Horton's with Ron and have a cuppa tea and a comforting chocolate chip muffin. Two guesses which I did.

When we got back, I was all set to just call this a ScarfFAIL day but I figured I at least needed some pictures to go with it, so I went downstairs to take some. And, you know, after a relaxing cup of tea and a nice chat at Tim's, I decided the scarf didn't look that bad, really:


Maybe a little wonky at the selvage, yes, but mostly all right. Good enough that I could wear it anyway, if I just got it done... and so I sat back down to keep weaving. That right there, that was mistake #4.

I managed to get another 12" or so woven, with it wooshing to the floor every time I advanced. I noticed that after each time it did, the tension was just a little bit more lopsided than before. Turns out the rod was sliding back and forth and, as every good physics student knows, the further a weight is from the fulcrum, the more pressure it exerts.³ So I had to shift the rod back and forth each time to try and find the balance point so that the fell was mostly straight. Big pain.

And then this happened:


Yep, that'd be the apple pop sitting on the floor and the lemonade dangling up in the air. Not good.


Nope, not good at all.

This time, no matter how I jiggled and balanced and futzed about, I couldn't get the tension even at the fell:


So there you have it: my first official Scarf FAIL. Maybe I can use the fabric for something else.

And now... now I'm gonna go play some WoW. :P

See you tomorrow with a fun little guest scarf woven by Patsy Morris for a very lucky friend!


1. Somewhere, in a comment I can't seem to locate, Mom suggested setting the warp closely and then using a very fine weft, a la Anita Luvera Mayer. Really, I should have resleyed the warp and beat the weft in less but what can I say? It was a lazy weaving day!

2. Yes, they are still full of pop. Somehow we just have never gotten around to drinking that apple flavoured pop, nor that last bottle of lemonade pop. Who makes apple flavoured pop, anyway? Who BUYS apple flavoured pop?? Apparently we do, but we don't drink it.

3. Geeze oh geeze, I hope that's right. It's been an awfully long time since I was a good physics student. In fact, that's a lesson I remember from... what, third or fourth grade?

Markedly different [Scarf 33]

I wound a new warp to put on the loom today. In the chain it looks pretty similar to the last one...


...but on the warping mill you can see that it's actually quite a departure for me:


As you've probably noticed if you've been reading for a while, my usual MO is to pick some colours that I like together and wind them many at a time, which gives me the same mix of colours across the warp whether I thread them randomly or in stripes. Lately I've been thinking more and more about winding the colours in Proper Stripes^(tm) and today I finally decided to do it.

My inspiration for this particular warp was a bookmark I've had for a few years now; usually I lose these paper bookmarks in a heartbeat but I've kept this one all this time because every time I look at it, I think "Wow, I'd love to weave that some day." I also think, "Wow, look how they put in that skinny stripe of unexpected red (or orange, or yellow). I love that!"


I didn't go so far as to put in a stripe of red but I did put in a couple skinny stripes of colours that appear nowhere else in the warp. The warp is mostly 4/8 cotton but I also put in a couple narrow bands of boucle and in three spots I crammed four 2/8s into one dent just for kicks.


'Course, I'm kicking myself over that a little bit because the 2/8 isn't taking up at the same rate as the 4/8 so I'm going to have to cut & tie between each scarf to relieve the tension on those threads. Still, I'm glad I did it - I like the extra surface texture.

I think I did a pretty good job of capturing the feel of the bookmark's stripes. I wasn't so sure about the colours at first but, like yesterday's tan, they grew on me as I wove. I'm really anxious to see what it looks like once it's wet finished and worn, which is always the final test of success with a new type of design or colour scheme. If I like the result, I'll probably be doing lots more of these since it wasn't nearly as fiddly or time consuming to wind the warp as I feared. It's not quite the same instant gratification as my usual method but it's definitely workable!


Scarfa #33 done!