Threadedness.

I finished threading all the heddles in the Ocean-Born Mary scarf warp last night.  Not too bad, since there were only about 500 needed.  I did catch myself in a threading error near the end of the penultimate repeat - I had skipped one thread on harness #7.  I also discovered that I had to add seven additional string heddles on harness #5, and was dreading it, but it was not at all difficult to add them once they were in order.  Phew...

 

It's astonishing to see about twenty different colors in the warp become a gradient of blue-to-green-to-blue.  I am wondering how the advancing twill pattern will read once it's finished.  The warp is so many different colors, but the weft is just one color, deep tealish-green, to contrast with the riot of color in the warp.

 

This is the first warp I've ever done which uses a non-straight threading.  I was nervous about that, but it turned out pretty well (I won't know about other potential threading errors until the first couple of inches of weaving has been done).  The complex threading seems to be easily broken down into smaller chunks (in this case, it was little units of four, which was the number of ends in each crossing) and lends itself to an almost musical rhythmic mnemonic.  Twice I was interrupted in the middle of each 64-end threading sequence, though, and was not able to find my place again (a means of marking the place seems to be needed here) without counting all the way through the sequence again, which was headache-inducing and VERY SLOW.  Gah.  As long as I was able to keep going through the sequence it was quite fast.

 

What a terrific feeling to finish the threading.  Tonight, it'll be time to sley the reed (2 per dent in a 20-dent reed) and tie on; then to add four bars to the dobby chain and to input the pegs.  That's slow too, but shouldn't take more than an hour or so.  And then...finally...weaving!!