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.