Warping is going fast!

I started beaming my Ocean-Born Mary scarves last night. 

I have to say that the AVL Warping Wheel is earning its keep!   This time I was warping with four ends at a time, so that with 40 epi I only had to do 20 passes to do the two-inch bouts.  

Inadvertently I wound 12 yards on each section, instead of the 9-yard warp I had intended (and for which I had already done the math).  This of course ended up using the yarn much faster than I had imagined - the quickly-disappearing yarn raised a red flag for me, and that's when I rechecked my original calculations and discovered my error. 

However, this is not too bad as errors go.  The color gradient is still working nicely across the warp, and although I have to dunk more of the reserve yellow yarn into the indigo vat to make it green, I had actually set aside about 2,000 more yards of yellow exactly for this reason.  So although I have to now dye more yarn, the good thing is that I only have to do the indigo portion (the yellow dyeing portion is much more time-consuming than the indigo portion of the process) and I will have enough warp to finish the scarf.  I'll have to do this quickly, because I want to be sure to get this warp up and weaving by the time my exalted guest comes from Japan to visit my studio on 9/6/14.   I would like for her to have the experience of weaving on the AVL mechanical dobby if it turns out she wants to try it.

And, by dint of my above error, I will have enough warp for a whole 'nother scarf.  Not such a whoops after all.

I don't like the unexpected, I don't like making mistakes; correcting errors can be awful.  Luckily this is not a bad one, just one that makes a bit more work for me.  It's not the kind of error that requires the removal of any of my preciously-dyed silk yarn that I beamed yesterday.

It was almost comical to see how quickly the winding/beaming went, with the four ends going.  It took me about half an hour to wind and beam two 2" bouts, 12 yards in length.   And they went on effortlessly and accurately; no mysteriously loose ends showing up, no breakage at all, and the yarn packages are super-neat and tight on the sectional beam. 

Onward!

"Ocean-Born Mary" scarf warp about to get beamed!

 

 

I spent a good portion of Saturday winding off the small 400-yard hanks, all different colors, onto all the kiwaku I could locate in the studio. 

 

Then I played with them in various lights for a couple of hours, and finally came up with this progression (which is based on hue, and not shade...you'll see dark and light shades next to each other).  I finally got them in this order and everything just 'clicked'. 

 

I have a feeling that this will all go very well with the advancing twill draft.  It's my first time ever doing an advancing twill!  And it's one I can still do with the mechanical dobby; eight harnesses and forty sheds per repeat.  Eventually I'd like to reattach the compu-dobby, and using all sixteen harnesses available, do much longer repeats than I can comfortably do on the mechanical dobby.

 



Yesterday I slothed out and watched a lot of Robin Williams movies which were on because of his recent passing, and later spent a great deal of time in the kitchen roasting a chicken and preparing dinner, so I never got down to the studio to start winding warp on the Warping Wheel.  Tonight I'll begin.  After a workday I'm often less inclined to warp, but since Katsuura-san is coming sometime over the next month to meet me and see the studio, I'm keen to have this project up and running soon so she can have a go at using the AVL loom. 

 

 

Nope, it didn't work...

Last night I tried to wind a skein of silk onto a quill which I'd placed around the axle of the zakuri.

Nope, that method did not work.  The axle, at center, does not spin quickly enough for this to be a viable method of building a yarn package in a reasonable amount of time.  So I ended up just putting on a kiwaku bobbin and winding it onto that, which worked. 

I counted all the kiwaku I own, and there are seventeen.  I could make more, and probably will do so at some point, but it's not possible now, and they're very expensive to buy.  That said, they remain one of the most useful bobbin designs ever invented, and they've been in use for thousands of years (because they work, and can hardly be improved on).  They're also quite beautiful. 

What I'm going to do for now is to wind the silk for the Ocean-Born Mary scarf project onto all the kiwaku I have with the exception of the two that hold the gold and silver bullion threads, and simply wind the silk on top of whatever is already on them.  This will actually give me enough so that I can warp the loom easily.  And it's a tried-and-true method. 

Onward...

Winding

So now I have 36 skeins of nicely-dyed 30/2 silk ready to wind into cones/blobs/whatever, for the warping. 

Since I'm planning this warp to be wound with four warp threads per pass on the warping wheel, and want to be able to swap out single threads from the four-end package (to work in other colors, gradually), I have to be able to have as many cones ready as I have colors (there are about 12 separate kinds of green in this warp!).  I don't have bobbins, I don't have a spool rack, I only have about 14 kiwaku/itomaki and they're all full, and I was flummoxed. 

Then it occurred to me that I can wrap long paper 'quills' around the axle of my zakuri, and wind each 400-yard skein onto one of those.  At 400 yards each, the yarn packages will not be too huge, and I can more or less come up with an elongated egg-shaped winding package that will be able to roll around in a bowl or jar as I wind the warp.  I only need to have four going at once, so that should work.  The axle of the zakuri is not really tapered, so if I run into difficulties removing the yarn quills, I can try to use my tapered pirn winder, which *does* have a long, tapered spindle on it, though that would be much more work than it would be to use the zakuri.

Right now the nicest present I could get would be about 50 kiwaku, but that'd cost a lot!  Time and again I have learned that as old and primitive as it is, the zakuri is still a pretty fast and efficient tool for all kinds of winding. 

In any case, I'm going to try the paper-wrapped quill on the zakuri tonight when I get home.

More Indigo

Yesterday after work I came home and made a beeline for the indigo vat.  There were several skeins of the Ocean-Born Mary silk that I wanted to dunk into the vat again to see what depth of color I could make.  With a thiourea dioxide vat, there's always the risk that you can only get to a certain depth before the alkalinity of the vat actually strips indigo off the fibers that's been already laid down.

So I did several quick dips rather than dips of any length of more than a minute or so.  I did get darker and more saturated hues on the several skeins, including a very vibrant medium green (it did not get to the 'ao-iro' range, but it did become richer and more saturated, and looks nice alongside the other skeins. 

I also dyed Rosemary's scarf that I forgot to redye over a number of years.  The sky-blue indigo was exactly the right indigo to overdye the earlier indigo, which had not taken well.   This morning, after last night's washing, vinegar balancing, and many rinses later, it was a fantastic medium blue color, quite saturated and beautiful.  And even this morning it doesn't smell too bad.  Not like, as a friend quipped, "...a fishing boat on a hot day...".

Tomorrow is the August meeting of the Loom and Shuttle Guild.  I'm looking forward to it.  Tien will not be there, since her mom is visiting, but I'm going to go.  It's the guild exchange/sale day, so I might be able to pick up some interesting yarn or equipment.  We'll see.