Warping Wheelies!

The AVL Warping Wheel is now on its way!!

I'm certain that I can make the cross-maker myself, and Tien has most generously offered me a tension box!!

Tien mentioned the masking tape as a means of keeping sectional warps in order - and that she prefers the cross maker when she's warping fine threads (which is always, basically ;-).  I then saw a little video on using the Warping Wheel which featured a nice close-up on how to tape the threads using masking tape.  That gives me courage.  I think, though, for warps of very fine threads, say, 60/2 and finer, and especially for slippery organzine warps, a cross is so helpful in keeping the threads in order that I'll use that method as a matter of course.

Watching the video of the AVL Warping Wheel in use also made me realize that even if I were winding non-sectionally on a flat beam, it's useful.  The lady in the video made a nice warp chain, and then she took the warp off of tension and chained it.  So she wasn't actually doing sectional warping, but she surely made that warp fast - using the wheel v.s. using a warping board.  I love my warping board, but it involves a lot of motion that appears to not be needed while using the WW.  Probably a big time-saver.

I'm glad Tien trained me on how to use the WW.  It looks much more complicated a process than it actually is.  It took me a couple of tries, but the second time I did it it worked out quite nicely. 

I'll have to clear a few extra feet lengthwise at the rear of Loom Millicent to make room for the WW when it is being used to beam on.  The alternative would be to build a whole set-up for beaming on, but that's harder than cleaning, and plus, where the heck would I put it?  ;-)

This is a great day; I've been wanting a WW for years - mostly what stopped me was not having a sectional beam to justify the cost - even though there are people who use the WW non-sectionally.  I had originally bought a kit to add sectional beam dowels to my existing Cranbrook warp beam, the gigantic super-heavy marvellous octagonal beam, but it didn't quite fit, and then it occurred to me to start searching for a used AVL loom.  Not having a sectional beam and a means to warp it has been a bit of an obstacle in terms of weaving very fine organzines as warp; with the WW I will be able to wind and keep this kind of warp under tension from the moment it leaves the cone or bobbin until it is tied onto the apron and woven.  The only other thing I'll need to accomplish this perfectly is a servante, a little velvet-covered clamp on cords that was used in the Lyonnais silkweaving industry; it's basically a third hand that holds the warp threads under tension while doing the 'reaching in' (read: threading the heddles) and sleying. 

To that end, I'm thinking of two servantes: a wide-ish one to hold all of the warp at the cross, and a small one to hold the bout that is currently being threaded. 

I'd really like to weave a long warp of silken tallitot to sell; I haven't done that in some years, and when I was doing that before, they sold like hotcakes!  The WW will allow me to do this without first having to purchase gigantic amounts of thread as I would have to with a spool rack. 

Other wishes (or reminders to myself to make these): supple plastic tubing that I can place over the hooks on the tops of the harnesses where the harness cables attach (to prevent 'leaping harnesses') and also something slightly larger to go over the dowels of the section being warped. 

Also, I noticed yesterday when I treadled Millicent: the cables to the treadles have stretched slightly, very slightly; but enough so that the left treadle needs to forward the dobby cylinder without having to be stomped all the way to the bottom.  :-)

Tubular, totally tubular.

I've been winding the warp for the dresser scarf for my sister Carol.  I am using a sectional beam, but having no spool rack nor an AVL Warping Wheel yet, I am winding 2" chains on a conventional warping board with pegs, and am winding six chains.  

Each chain I am winding up, under tension, onto an empty toilet paper tube.  Actually, each chain is wound onto two toilet paper tubes, one inside the other for extra collapse resistance.  I've been using the toilet paper tube method for years.  It works well enough, though optimally only with spun silk yarn, and not organzine, which is sufficiently slippery to require a way to hold the warp under consistent tension and as flatly as possible.  This is the very reason that sectional warping will be my upcoming direction; it's not that sectional warping is faster (which it can be, by using enough spools on a spool rack), but that I will be perfectly able to keep slippery organzine warps under consistent tension, without the intermediary step of removing it from a warping board; even trying very hard to keep it under tension and winding onto a kite stick or tube involves a few steps during which, however brief, the tension on the warp must be relaxed.  

This doesn't always create problems, but it often does, and it's better to be able to keep slippery warps under tension at all times since doing this means that the warp has no time to slacken and tangle.  Any warp can tangle, but a fine organzine warp is the worst (second only to the amazing tanglitude of an untensed skein of tram).  Silk is very precious and I am always looking for ways to avoid waste!

I went to the AVL Looms website yesterday to look again at the offerings on the Warping Wheel page.  I think I can get by with purchasing just the warping wheel and its cross maker (but who the heck winds warps without crosses, for pete's sake?  Why is this extra?).  When Tien uses her Warping Wheel she also uses a tension box between the cones of yarn and the Warping Wheel.  AVL makes one, but it's almost four hundred dollars extra.  I wonder if I can get by without the tension box?

The good thing is that it's not hard for me to make a tension box if it turns out that I need one.

In any case, after Tien taught me how to use the Warping Wheel, I'm now pretty comfortable with the way it works, and trust it as a device that can help me keep silk under tension while putting it onto the warp beam of the loom.  Probably nothing is quite so excellent for very fine silks as a spool rack and enough spools (and of course, a tension box in that case) but at this point I'm not planning to wind very long warps yet (as production increases, then I would do that, but it's pointless while doing only sample warps or small warps).

For the spun 2-ply silk I'm using for my sister's dresser scarf, luckily, I can just warp it in the conventional way on the warping board, and then wind it onto the sectional warp beam in 2-inch sections.  I developed a kind of bastardized way of placing lease sticks below the raddle, and suspending them firmly with weights attached, which keeps them separated.  The weighted lease sticks, while winding the warp onto the warp beam, function as a sort of improvised tension box and does a lot in the way of evening warp tension while winding.

Face not seen since the middle of the sixteenth century...

Tangles, Patience, and Fortitude.

No weaving per se this weekend, since the inaugural warp has been woven off the loom.  However, I did do lots of fiber work, of the preparatory kind: winding off skeins onto bobbins.  Since these were all skeins of silk organzine and tram, it was tricky going, but despite getting lots of tangles (lots, and lots.), I was still able to wind off a great deal of silk, and the losses I had with earlier attempts to wind off organzine or tram were not repeated.  There was loss, of course, but I ended up getting about 95% of each skein wound, compared to the 55% I was getting before. 

I keep returning to the idea of trying to reproduce the method I saw in Diderot's Encyclopédie called the 'Tour d'Espagne';  in which a rather solid, blocky base holds two springy poles which laterally stretch a skein.  One of the poles is very tall and has an eye through which the silk coming off the skein is threaded; from the eye the filament goes down again, under light tension, to the dévideuse who is presumably winding it onto a bobbin or a reel.  One curious thing is that the Tour d'Espagne doesn't rotate the way a swift does; it remains stationary.  I don't know what that would be like for dealing with tangles, but right away I see that if the yarn is held tightly in an arrangement that does not move, then the extra tangles that arise from the momentum of the swift rotating would simply not happen in an arrangement that does not move.  However, the rotation of the swift also allows air to circulate through the whirling skein, which I suspect assists with the unwinding - if I wind too slowly, the tangles are worse, but if I speed up very slightly, then the skein is rather aerated, is slightly 'aloft', and threads tangled beneath others can be freed up this way. 

Experience and doggedness and a deep unwillingness to waste precious thread conspired to make me work through almost all the tangles in the skeins yesterday.  I was astonished at how much thread you can still get from a horribly-tangled-looking skein.  When I got to the point of no return as I did last time, I simply kept going, and voila, I got another thousand or so yards of silk organzine out of the hell-skein.

There must have been procedures and techniques in place that would have at least minimized waste, back in the day.  I don't think that the entire silk industry was premised on a bunch of picky people sitting around slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y winding off tangled skeins.  Maybe it was a different world where it was possible to pay skein winders to deal with this. 

Minimizing handling and tangling during the washing and dyeing processes has helped, as has Tien's Tinkertoy Swift (especially wonderful for winding off tram, in a nice leisurely way). 

Winding Great Lengths of String.

Didn't get any weaving done yesterday, or prep for the loom to receive the next warp, but I did spend a great amount of time winding skeins onto spools.  The wonderful green and the rich red will be used in the next project, which will be the table scarf for my sister.

 

 





 

 

 

I also started winding off the cochineal-dyed tussah organzine I had dyed last fall.  I'm still not quite sure what I will do with this, other than for certainly weaving it in combination with the undyed version of this wonderful yarn, which is a soft lustrous cream color.  Something cream and crimson.  And this particular organzine has quite a strong twist, and makes for a crepe-like feel in the finished fabric.  It is best in tabby, but I am itchy to explore a more complex weave with the organzine.  I do also have quite a number of nicely-dyed trams, which can work as weft, so I may use those too once I figure out the scope of the project.

 

 

Above is my Reeves clock reel with some of the crimson cochineal-dyed tussah organzine wound onto it.  Having been burned by trying to wind off dyed skeins too fast, and causing breakage and augmenting tangles, I have been winding this one quite slowly.  It's still tangling, and there have been three breaks so far (with doubtlessly more to come; this is silk...) but so far so good.  At a certain point last night I had to just stop winding and go to bed; when I am winding off fine silk, I sort of hover at a level of internal tension and sharp, narrow focus of concentration.  I spent about two hours winding off the silk above...below is a photo of the skein on Rosemary's squirrel-cage swift.  It's basically impossible to not tangle reeled fine silk at least a bit when unwinding from a dyed skein, but tangles are not necessarily the end of the skein.  I've learned a lot about patience when winding off fine silks!!

 

Interestingly, while I was winding off last night, a prominent little thought popped into my mind: "Use a spray bottle because it will help with the static and minimize the breakage when you're winding off in a dry environment!".  It could have been just plain deduction on my part, but sometimes I like to think that assistance comes to me as I do this work, assistance from the unseen. 

 

It worked, for sure - a couple of shpritzes every fifteen minutes or so in the area around the rotating swift (but not directly aimed at the yarn) seemed to really help with the tangles!

Next Project

One of my older sisters asked me if I might consider making a dresser scarf for her - it's to be used atop a new cabinet she bought recently.  I'm honored.  I love to make things for my family, and my sister Carol has been a fan of my textiling since the beginning.  I think she still has a scarf I wove for her in 1983, during my apprenticeship!

Taking cue from the colorways I've been working in recently, particularly that of the madder red and the Osage orange/indigo greens together, I decided to continue with the green/red combination.  Today I remembered a skein of variegated green that I have, so I wound that from skein to clock reel to zakuri bobbin.  The reason for adding the extra step of winding first to the clock reel is that after dyeing, the skeins are slightly tangled (or grievously tangled, depending...) and trying to wind them on the zakuri bobbin is difficult; this is because as the silk unwinds from the skein, sometimes it 'pops' slightly as it emerges from a tangle, causing the swift to lose tension at first and then go to far into the other direction, and then usually breaking.  I found that, for some reason, if I wind from the swift to the clock reel, which are of a similar diameter, while this still happens, the tensile extremes are not nearly as intense, and it almost never breaks.  

Then, winding from the nice snug and very much not tangled silk now stretched on the clock reel, it can be wound onto the zakuri bobbins without any tangle-jerking and breakage.  

This skein of green is particularly nice.  I deliberately dyed it in the indigo after-bath in such a way that there would be a variance in the bite of the dye on the outer part of the skein v.s. the inner part, creating a range of green running from a soft chartreuse to Lincoln Green to a blue-tinged green at the other extreme.  Overall it is rather brighter than the green I used as weft last week.  

The dresser scarf is to sit on a surface that is 31" long by 14" wide.  I will then make it to have a finished width of 12"; with the 31" length of the cabinet, adding a foot or so to hang over the ends, I will make for a finished length of 55" not including fringe.  

This lovely green is to be the weft; for the warp for this project, I will be using the same silk yarn, but dyed madder red.  It is, in fact, the same dyelot as the madder red in the previous project, the sample warp.  

I've chosen a 16-shaft pattern from J. Wood's book.   I suppose I could change to any of the patterns in that book just by adjusting the dobby pegs, since all the threading is point threading, not even a W/M draft.  This is good, because if in the first inches of the weaving I change my mind about the pattern, I can just re-do the dobby pegs.  I suppose I could even experiment to see what I get if I make a w-sequence in the 'tie-up' (peg plan), even though I can't change the threading of the harnesses in mid-warp.

These elegant and elaborate point twills, I am told, were widely woven between 1750 and 1850, but I suspect that they might have become common at earlier times; they were, for example, woven in England during the late Renaissance, and probably originated in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.  It is possible that they were often used for monochromatic linen, for which they are quite beautiful when pressed and glossed, but just playing around with the pieces of the sample warp makes me think that surely they were at least occasionally woven in silk - the diagonal lozenge patterns combined with the natural lustre of the silk come together to form a textile of great richness.

Revealing Other Mysteries.

I wove about eleven more inches on the inaugural warp.  Today, I wove fake cloth of gold, that is, very beautiful gold thread that is not made with real gold, though it is metal.  I have a couple of pounds of it on cones, so I was able to weave with more abandon than on the other day when I was weaving the real gold.  This thread is a thread with a round cross-section, rather than the flat ribbonlike thread that I have that is made of the real gold.  Not as bright, but with brilliant sparkles. 

And I did wet-finish this sample - this particular metallic thread has a rayon core, and is somewhat less delicate than the real gold, which only has a paper substrate to support it.  Round-section gold thread usually has a thread core, and then the substrate with the metal on it is wound round the core.

 

Then I steam-pressed it.  

Below is a photo of the two kinds of 'gold': the real gold is on the left, the 'fake' gold is on the right.

And I learned something new today - the solution to a problem I'd had with this inaugural warp.  I'd noticed that on a couple of passes, still not all of the harnesses lifted that were supposed to.   I checked the dobby bars and sure enough, there were no dobby pegs missing, as had been the case previously.  I adjusted the dobby strike minutely, and still no improvement; eventually I had to back out a bit because the dobby strike was so close that the pegs were too deep to allow the dobby cylinder to rotate.  So clearly, distance from the dobby fingers wasn't the issue.  Or, as it turned out, it was, but not because the cylinder was too far away from the dobby fingers in general.  There had to be something else at work...

I went over to the dobby box and for some minutes looked very closely at the dobby pegs, in that way one does while pondering some problem (sometimes I think that if I stare at a problem long enough, I'll divine what the solutions might be), and then I suddenly realized that all of the harnesses that would not lift were connected with one kind of dobby peg that was not like the majority of the pegs; they were actually very slightly shorter, only by about a millimeter or slightly more, but I had a suspicion that this tiny variation in height of the dobby pegs was the problem.  So I removed all the slightly shorter pegs, and replaced each of them with the same kind as all the other dobby pegs.  I held my breath in anticipation as I returned to the bench and treadled through the sequence, watching for the 'problem' passes.

It worked.

All the troubled harnesses that would not lift before now lifted just fine.  No more errors.  It was a very small difference in length, but it mattered. I could have adjusted the depth of the dobby strike, but then it would have made troubles with rotating the dobby cylinder because not all the pegs were at the same height.  It is important to remember that the dobby pegs must all be at a consistent height, or at least within the necessary tolerance.

I have to admit I kind of like encountering these little problems with the new loom; it teaches me good troubleshooting.  :-)  There's a mechanic deep within me who loves to figure stuff out.

Mechanical Mysteries, and Light, and Color.

I untangled the Situation with the cloth storage beam this morning - fixed by adding another weight to approximate the weight of the original weight that broke; and by removing the roller of the cloth storage beam, removing the roller pulley, re-winding the tangled nylon cord, and using the stop pin to advantage for this step to prevent out of control rolling.  It worked.  I tied on the remainder of the warp, and started to weave.

For some reason the rocker arm on the dobby sticks on two or three of the regular sheds of the 20-bar sequence I've got on there.  I think that part of it might be due to needing lubrication (paraffin on the axles, etc) but adjusted the depth of the dobby wheel minutely to avoid dropping harnesses.  I see it might be good to make sure that all of the dobby pegs I put on there are all the correct height (some of them are a good 1mm shorter, but most the same height).

I wove a few inches, manually helping the stuck rocker bar on some of the sheds, but othe than that, the loom has been weaving wonderfully.  

I'm including two photos I took after weaving - they're both the same green weft, but the first photograph was taken without ambient light but with the flash, while the second was taken with the flash turned off but with the ambient lights turned on.  I took this in order to show the difference between the two and to show how different the hues are, especially of the green!

Cloth O'Gold.

As I was driving along beautiful Sunset Blvd here yesterday on my way home from work, my mind of course started thinking about the sample warp on the loom waiting at home, and pondering which weft threads to try out - that's the fun thing about sample warps!  It occurred to me that I had that tiny spool of real gold thread from John Marshall - and except for the little bit I gave Tien to weave into her inaugural warp on her new-to-her AVL, I had not used any yet.

It took me a while to wind the silk onto a paper quill.  I used my slender damask shuttle rather than any of my tensioned end-feed shuttles, since any of the tensioning systems on the shuttles might abrade the fragile gold thread.  I'm not in the habit of using untensioned shuttles anymore - once I used Jim Ahren's shuttle from Rosemary, and my own Bluster Bay shuttles (especially the one with the Honex tensioner in it) I never looked back.  However, my Swedish-made damask shuttle was excellent for this project since the threads can unwind freely as the quill rotates.  So I picked a quill that would work for that shuttle and very, very carefully wound off a small amount of the flat gold thread onto the quill, taking great care to not add any twist to the flat thread.

I opened a shed and began to weave some green silk weft, and after weaving about an inch of that, gingerly started weaving with the gold.  I was pretty cautious to not twist it (it's incredibly easy to add twist - even without trying - to any string or cord, just by winding it or unwinding it) and beat very softly, just enough so that the gold threads were snugly in the shed but not twisted or squished at all.  To my delight and astonishment, it turned out to be much easier than I expected to keep the thread flat in the shed.

It took me about an hour to weave just two inches of the golden weft into the red silk warp, until finally the little quill in the damask shuttle gave up the last of its treasure.  This textile was woven at only about 50 picks per inch, which ordinarily would take me about two minutes to weave, but since each golden weft had to be so gently and carefully beaten in, I went quite slowly.

I didn't dare wet-finish it once this little sample came off the loom; the substrate of the double-sided flat gold thread is paper.  I did steam iron it, but very gently. 

The results are staggeringly rich to see; the splendid real gold is a great counterpoint to the madder-red silk warp threads.  It is not sturdy; I think that if I wanted to weave a more stable textile with gold thread woven in, I would use it as a supplementary weft in a structure in which the ground fabric had its own warp and weft.  It would work very well, for example, in double weave, or in lampas weave, such as the legendary golden lampas woven for the Mongol court in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Now that I have a 16-shaft loom, I can easily weave a fabric with two interlacing sets of warp/weft.

No washing of the cloth of gold, though; the only way to keep it clean is to never let it get dirty.  The amazing robes made of gold lampas and worn at the Mongol court were distributed to the nobles as tribute, and the penalty for washing one of the robes - because it would remove a great deal of the gold, all of which belonged to the Khan - was death! 

Once the golden cloth sample was finished, I sat in a pool of light from the setting sun by the living room windows looking at the cloth, turning it over and over in my hand and taking some photos of it.   I had gotten gold thread with a medium lustre only, not wanting it to be too shiny.  It is definitely shiny, but softly so.  And flat thread does not look the same as thread with a rounded cross-section.

The Japanese writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki once wrote, in his  In Praise of Shadows that cloth of gold, and gold-adorned lacquerware, in Japan, were always meant to be seen in subdued light, such as that given off by a candle inside a paper lantern. Otherwise, he said, it would simply be too gaudy. Better to see it in half-light or in shadow.

Video of Slinky Silk

 

Alas, the quality of this video seems to have degraded hugely on the (lossy, of course) upload, but you can kind of see what's going on.  Above all I wanted to illustrate the marvellous iridescent quality of this silk fabric.

 

 

Mad Fun with Different Wefts



I should probably have spent the evening cleaning house, but the call of the loom downstairs won me over.   Spent a good while weaving on the AVL on the inaugural warp I've been working on.

 

Since there is enough on this warp not only for the lute strap I'm making, but also to play with warp and weave up samples, I indulged in what is probably the most fun part of weaving - sampling!!

 

In addition to the violet (logwood) weft I wove with the night before last, I tried: madder red (same as the warp yarn, basically), indigo blue, and the Osage orange/indigo overdye green.

 

 

Better rhythm, which produces a more consistent fabric, and I adjusted the tension on the loom by tightening it slightly - the sheds were still perfect. 

 

Also, at one point, watching the harnesses (for this pattern there must always be four up, four down going on, regardless of which four) I noticed that one shed was consistently raising three harnesses instead of four.  I looked at the mechanical dobby and noticed that one of the bars had only three pegs in it; it was missing the peg for harness #1.  I added it, and it was corrected immediately.  The mistake is very tiny, but noticeable, and if you look carefully at the horizontal double diamond shapes, on the red, blue, and violet versions (all of which were woven before I added the missing dobby peg), the little points don't look so pointy.   Then on the green version, they are properly pointy again.  So that's what it was.  I had thought that perhaps I had put one into the hole and it fell out, or was stripped, but when I put in the missing peg the threadhole was not stripped, and the new peg screwed in perfectly. 

 

 

These shots all show the green in slightly different colors (the light was slightly different each time) but the closest to the actual color of the green is the image directly below:

 

 

The green one is my favorite.  There's a nice color value balance between the madder red and the green...very medieval in flavor, I think. 

 

 

Someone on Weavolution mentioned that the double-diamonds looked like an infinity symbol, and she declared that it was in honor of the infinitely amazing adventures in textiles I can have with the AVL loom. 

 

And I declare that that's exactly what I'd like. 

The AVL is Weaving!

Today, after three weeks of assembly and troubleshooting and finally warping, I threaded the heddles for the silk lute strap first project.  And then I sleyed the 20-dent reed that Tien gifted me with.  

I didn't think I'd get to the tie-on today, but I did, and not only that, I managed to make a dobby chain and mount it on the dobby, chain it with cable ties I bought today, and I got everything working.  Incredible.  From nothing to patterned cloth in no time flat!

I thought I'd start simply; an 8-harness pattern from Patricia Baine's Linen book.  There is a photo of some sixteenth-century linen and the draft to weave it.  It is the same pattern I wove twelve years ago when I borrowed Rosemary Brock's 8-harness Schacht Baby Wolf, with a mechanical dobby.  

This time, instead of weaving it white-on-white, I used two colors, one warp and one weft, to show the contrast.  See the pattern below.



The diagonal lines are wavy here, showing that my beat was irregular.  Warp tension was at first a bit loose.  Also, harness #5 collapsed suddenly, overhead wire and all, and it turned out to have been caused by the failure of the metal hook on the end of the cable coming up from the dobby, which unbent totally and straight.  Weird.  It might have been pulled suddenly during a jam, or it was simply metal fatigue.  Hopefully I won't have to replace it, but if I did, I'm going to use a slightly thicker guage wire. 

Overall the treadling was light and lovely, and the sheds were PERFECT.  Kudos and praise to AVL and their tireless engineering that is the AVL loom.  Even a comparatively old loom (mine is circa-1979 or '80) bears out this excellence. 

After I'd been through the 20-bar pattern repeat cycle on the dobby bars, and jammed the dobby a couple of times, it seemed that things sort of regulated themselves, and the dobby didn't jam after that.  Once it wasn't jamming, and I adjusted the allen-screw adjustors for the dobby cylinder so that the pins were striking ever so slightly deeper, I started to pick up speed.  It took a very short time only before I was weaving faster than I have ever been able to weave on the Cranbrook.  Clearly this is a whole new world of weaving for me.  Faster and more rhythmic means a more consistent beat (hopefully!) and a more uniform-looking textile.  It feels taut as a fine bowstring and as fleet as the arrow it propels when weaving quickly, as if one were shooting arrows from an English longbow - that kind of effortless, sinewy rapidity. 

The fabric looks quite three-dimensional on the loom; the red threads, in the pattern, stand up above the violet weft.  Add to that that the red color naturally proceeds forward and the cooler violet color backwards, so that it enhances the bas-relief quality.  However, once it is wet-finished, the silk will bed down into itself and the 3-D quality will be diminished a bit. But not totally - the arrangement of the two colors will still retain its foreground/background thing, due to the warm and cool differences.  Additionally, once it is steam-pressed after wet-finishing, all the float threads will take on a lustrous satiny shine.  Wet-finishing will also regularize the wavy diagonal lines a bit, as the energy in the yarn rearranges itself and balances with its neighboring threads.

Another pic:

 And another.  Showing where I started weaving, and how the tension of the thing sort of regularized as I gained rhythm.

More later.  I'm totally chuffed!

My gratitude goes to the previous owner of this loom, and his generosity; and to Tien and Carlos for helping me put it all together.

Meet my shadow, Sloth...

...or honestly, perhaps...fatigue. 

I got home from work late yesterday afternoon, with the good intention of putting the little warp onto Millicent, but ended up couchpotato-ing through early evening, falling asleep on the couch early, waking up suddenly, and staggering down the hall to the bedroom, where I dropped back to sleep in less than a minute.  Lotsa work stress yesterday, including a fender-bender (or, more accurately put, a license plate-bender) caused by a distracted person driving rapidly in reverse down the up-ramp in the hospital parking garage, zooming around a blind corner and colliding with me (and then flooring the gas and driving away as fast as possible, leaving me behind with a squashed front license plate and a mouthful of un-uttered cuss words.  Happily I was not hurt.  And whoever it was, I saw by the great number of smashed places on his car, this was probably not the first time he had done something like this.

Fun news: I learned that Peter Dinklage, from Game of Thrones, is a Bennington College alumnus.  He's from the class of 1991, so I would not have encountered him while I was there, since I'm Bennington class of 1986.  Royalty recognizes royalty!

This weekend, though - in addition to us cleaning in preparation for my visiting mother-in-law and sister-in-law, I'm hoping to get the warp on the loom and at least threaded through the heddles and sleyed in the reed.  And it would be wonderful if I can also get the dobby chain prepared too - and then it's weaving time!!  My first sandpaper beam.  What I remember from weaving on Rosemary's dobby-run Schacht Baby Wolf twelve years ago, is that once everything is set up, the weaving goes madly fast.  It is a simple W-draft, and the treadling order (transposed into the order of the dobby bars) is also in the shape of a W.  The 'tie-up' is accomplished by adding a dobby peg in the hole on the dobby bar to correspond with each harness to be lifted.  I do anticipate some adjustments in the distance of the dobby chain cylinder from the dobby fingers, but there's usually a happy medium to that. 

I'm also having naughty thoughts about weaving true satin for the first time.  I certainly have enough harnesses to do so now - I could do a 5, 7, and 11-leaf satin.  I have the proper materials too, organzine and tram.  The only thing I wonder about is whether the sandpaper beam would degrade the fine silk thread, especially the glorious untwisted tram!!  I think I'll try it and then make adjustments as necessary, perhaps covering the sandpaper surface and tensioning the warp from the cloth storage beam in the back instead.  And since the untwisted tram is the glossier of the two kinds of thread, and is not really useable for warp, I'll do a weft satin.

Warping is completed...

...which is not surprising, since it is only 176 ends, including the selvedges.  But it felt so fun to finish it - the first project on Millicent!!

Tien mentioned to me that selvedges in tabby would not have the same take-up, and would result in ruffly selvedges.  Totally makes sense.  She suggested basket weave or twill, both of which have similiar take-up to the point twill I'm planning.  I've decided to go with basket weave for this project's selvedges.  I seemed to remember having looked at the piece of late-16th-century Italian velvet I have, the one that has good portions of both selvedges still attached, and recalling that the selvedges were in tabby, but I went and looked at it last night, and sure enough, the selvedges are in basket weave.  They are green, of course, with a couple of silver threads running through them, which I seem to recall having read somewhere as indicating the use of cochineal dye in the beautiful crimson silk pile on the velvet.  (I think that one silver warp thread in the selvedges meant kermes dye, and two silver warp threads in the selvedge indicated new-world cochineal dye.  I might have that backwards.)

Since the basket weave and the point twill have similiar take-up, I can beam them onto the same warp beam. 

I need to remember to get more disposable cable ties.  Just reminding myself here.

I'll use the nice 20-dent reed that Tien recently gifted me with (I was 'asked' by a conductor on the CalTrain to offboard the train I was on, the night I was bringing the reed back up here from Tien's.  I don't know what he thought it was, but he was mighty suspicious.  I tried to explain to him what it was for, but he wasn't interested in hearing it - he was just interested in getting me off the train.  He made me get off at Millbrae, which, I didn't tell him, was the station I was going to get off at anyway.  He told me he was 'cutting slack' for me by not writing a citation for carrying a  - a - a - a - a whatever it was.  Thanks, I guess).  Anyway, it's a nice reed, quite worth getting thrown off a train for.  Since this first project is 40 epi, I can sley two threads per dent.  I don't know the last time I sleyed so few threads in a dent - the 20 is now the finest reed I own...usually I end up sleying four or five or six threads per dent, but this new reed will help with that!

Am planning to beam the warp tonight when I get home from work.   There is a beautiful little raddle that came with the loom, a thousand times better than the clumsy handmade one I've been using for the past twelve years (it works, but it is uglyyyy and unwieldy and stuck with peeling duct tape).  I can beam the warp onto the sectional beam using the raddle, but this time I've decided that I'm going to wind on with the porrey cross being the last thing to go towards the beam, instead of the way I usually wind on, which is to put the porrey cross right by the warp beam onto the lease sticks, and then wind on.  Most of what I use the porrey cross for, while winding on, is to spread the warp properly as it winds on.  Since I'm winding on in 2" bouts, the warp doesn't really need to spread over the lease sticks since the sections limit the spread somewhat.  I *will* need the porrey cross when I am threading the heddles, however.

Tien brought up the already-painted heddles that she bought for her new loom (painting them in a selection of colors really helps when threading heddles over sixteen - or more - harnesses - Tien's AVL has 40 harnesses!!) for me to use.  I am going to put them on the harnesses, with the colors in order (for example: Harness 16, red/Harness 15 yellow/Harness 14 blue/Harness 13 white/Harness 12 red, Harness 11 yellow, etc.).  I helped thread a small portion of Tien's inaugural warp on her AVL (Emmy) and found the system to work very well indeed.  For me, when threading a pattern warp, when I really have to pay strict attention to which harness I'm threading on, distraction - even looking away from the heddles for a split second - causes a slight delay in the flow due to having to re-find where I was.  This slight lag adds up to hours, over a wide warp.  Using the colored heddle system really speeds it up since it is so much easier to identify the place where I've left off.

To thread the heddles I can now also use my vintage Robin & Russ brass double-ended heddle/reed hook (it is tapered and has a small hook for threading heddles and a larger hook on the other end for sleying the reed).  To sley the reed I have a choice of the aforementioned hook, or the 'walking sleying hook' that Tien gifted me with (she also gave me the R&R hook, too.).

Happily I found that other skein of the madder-dyed 30/2 silk, because the remainder of the other skein was all but used up for this little warp. 

Onward...

It's getting warped...

Late this afternoon I started to wind the warp for the initial project on the AVL loom.  I've decided that I'm going to weave the W-twill I wove before on Rosemary's dobby loom twelve years ago, the one with eight harnesses.  This time, however, I have decided to weave it with tabby selvedges, which I can do now with the 16-harness loom.  I don't think I ever really worked out in my mind how to add the selvedges in tabby, but tonight it suddenly dawned on me how to do it with the dobby.  It will have to be tensioned separately from the main warp, but that's possible now to do with the two warp beams.   For the pattern I'm thinking of, eight of the sixteen harnesses will be devoted to the main threads, which will be in a beautiful twill, with two additional harnesses carrying the selvedge threads in tabby.  All I will have to change is to add a pin for the tabby in each dobby bar, alternating the dobby pins in the hole for harness 9 with that of harness 10, all alongside the pins that spell out the design repeats for the main part of the fabric.  I think.  I've never done that before, but I think I have it right.  Suddenly I could see it in my head, so I think it will work.  

I was originally going to weave something with 60/2 silk but I think I will save that for the scarf for my friend Noemí.  I looked through the 30/2 I have still on spools left over from the color gamp project last year, and the one with the most silk on it still is the madder-dyed one.  Here it is:

 Since I chose madder red, in homage to the old Italian silk weavers of the Renaissance I will add the tabby selvedges in their signature green.  There is precious little of the green left, so the eight threads on each side of the main web, should be enough.

 I started winding the warp.

I'm currently winding it on the old warping board, since I do not have a spool rack nor an AVL Warping Wheel.  Since this is for a sample project, I am going to make it narrow.  I've decided to weave a lute strap, which will be four inches wide at the wide point where it goes over the lutenist's back.  The selvedges, as I said, will be green.  I'm winding three yards on the warping board, and I'm making each bout 80 ends, which at 40 epi will spread into a 2" space on the sectional warp beam.  I'm winding two of those spaces on the sectional warp beam, plus eight threads at the selvedge tensioned on the non-sectional beam (but riding over the same back beam).

 In addition to the red and green, there is also blue (from indigofera suffruticosa) and violet (from logwood) which I dyed last year.   I'm curious to see all these colors in the weft, as well as the red.  The elaborate twill pattern, which has some float threads, should produce a kind of faux-relief of one color against another.

Here is a piece of a Mexican lime, which is the tastiest salt substitute I've yet tried.

The AVL is completely assembled, and works!!

Here is the link to YouTube where I've uploaded a brief, shaky video showing the AVL loom working.

http://youtu.be/IRJlrUC-9yE

Carlos and I went to Westlake Plaza this morning, and while there we ducked into Home Depot to get some coated wire cable, crimps, and a 'swaging' tool, that is to say, a crimper.  Not nearly as expensive as I'd thought it would all cost, so that was good.

We came home and after lunch I went downstairs to the garage and had a go at attaching the cables to the treadles.  It was tough getting my ample frame inside the loom to sit in back of the harnesses, in front of the warp beams, but I did it!  I had pre-emptively thrown the sheepskin down there in order to not have to sit on the cold cement floor.   It worked nicely.  Only when I was comfortably seated on the sheepskin did it finally occur to me that because this is an AVL, it would have been totally easy to remove the warp beams and the back beam roller, to permit access to the back and down into the area with the treadle pulleys!

Crimping the cables worked nicely too, and I got the treadles working just fine.  It took a little figuring out, but I found that if I pushed the dobby-advancing treadle (the longer one, to the left) all the way down to the spot where it pulled the dobby to the next slot, and then attached the cable that causes the harnesses to lift to the right-hand treadle (the slightly shorter one) in its highest position, it worked.   Then I tightened the turnbuckle on the cable that advances the dobby, for fine-tuning.  I might have to tighten it a little more tomorrow or at some point - while wire cable is pretty inelastic, I would suppose that there will be - however small - some stretch.

Now I can 'feel' the way the whole mechanism fits together, in my mind, schematically, in a kind of three-dimensional moving diagram.  Performing the reassembly of the mechanical dobby and then hanging the harnesses and tying up the treadles have all helped me build this moving diagram in my mind.  Now I can easily visualize the entire concept and mechanism, all its parts moving together in simultaneous concert, from the dobby fingers and dobby bar to the threads being lifted (or not) in the harnesses, and the marvelous clacking motion of the dobby wheel going round.  It's so beautiful.  It's like seeing one of Leonardo da Vinci's splendid drawings of cogged machinery and clockwork come to life.

Beautifully simple, and so finely-tuned.  The engineering of the AVL looms is legendary.

After that, I put a short 16-bar dobby chain onto the rotating cylinder of the dobby, and joined it with two wire ties.  I had put one dobby pin onto each bar, so that each of the sixteen harnesses would be singly lifted in succession, to test everything.  16 harnesses adds an astonishingly large number of shaft lift possibilities; 8 shafts give a possibility of 256 different lifts; 12 shafts make 4094 possible lifts, and 16 shafts multiplies it to an astounding 65,534 possible sheds.

It took a slight shifting of the position of the cylinder in the dobby - I had to adjust its tension screws until it backed off very slightly from the dobby finger strike plates, just about 1 millimetre back, and then it worked very smoothly.  I sat down and treadled through the sequence and each harness lifted in succession cleanly, the dobby wheel clicking merrily as I treadled.

One more micro-adjustment on the turnbuckle on the dobby cable - and the treadling was made slightly crisper and more 'snug'.

Then I called Carlos downstairs to show him the loom working.  Yay!

The spring on the sprung wheel-bar that limits the advancement of the dobby cylinder is very resonant!  I might see if I can muffle it a little bit with a bit of felt stuffed inside.  I can certainly deal with it if it doesn't work, but I'll try.

Next: warping the first project on the AVL!

Onward!

The previous owner of this loom kindly contacted me to address the challenge of the tilting harness.   It turns out to be not the springs, thank goodness, but rather the spread of the heddles.  After friend Tien and I finished putting on the remaining harnesses yesterday, I added more heddles on the other side of the hooks, beyond what will be the weaving area, to the end of the the harness bars, and the whole tension of the system seemed to fall into place.  Gratitude and delight!!

Tien figured out the other things that I was trying to figure out, such as how the cloth storage beam works, and how to properly suspend the weighted tension bars for the two warp beams.  

The photograph of the harness here, btw, does not show the additional heddles on yet.

Here's a beautiful shot of harmony and order under light tension.  There's a beautiful tension to it, like when a bowstring is put onto a bow.

I'm off to Home Depot this morning to get some aircraft cable or wire rope to redo the treadle cables, one of which had metal fatigue at a critical point.  After that I should be able to operate the treadles.  

I am enjoying the tuning process!