It's been cold here for about four days - actually, almost too cold to go downstairs and weave at all!
I did weave on Saturday - it was cold, but I had to do laundry, and since the laundry machines are next to the loom, especially with the dryer running, it was slightly less cold. Not warm, mind you: slightly less cold. I just kept running upstairs and adding layers. I tend to pride myself on my ability to withstand cold - after all, I was born in Vermont - but lately it's been harder as I get older, and it was nearly freezing in the basement. The vigorous movement of weaving also helped, but I was very glad for the wool turtleneck I was wearing, and Sylvia's wonderful fingerless mitts made of SuperWash Merino kept my hands warm without encumbering my fingers.
I did get about 24" of the silk woven on Saturday, on the same sample as I've been blogging about in previous posts. I alternately wove horizontal stripes with the grey-blue tram, and then the Japanese antique silver thread. Looks good, though the direct horizontal stripes somewhat muddy the pronounced effect of the diagonal movement in 'color and weave' of the finished web.
I'm thoroughly pleased, though, on a couple of counts: one being that I can confidently weave thread as fine as 60/2 and probably 120/2 on the AVL. The other count is that, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I discovered that I'd been doing the AVL tension totally wrong, and that that was the reason I was having sheds in which all the raised threads went noticeably slacker than the un-raised ones - but the secret is that on an AVL, the tensioning is really a dynamic system (hate to sound trite with 'dynamic', but that really is the right word here) and doesn't work properly if the tension arm is firmly fixed instead of adjusting to each shed. I had been worried that the free-floating tension arm with the weight would prevent the warp from being tight enough to weave the firm setts and beats I like. Erroneous thinking. In order to have a heavier tension on the warp, it does help to have a little extra weight on the pulley that keeps the cloth-storage beam taut, but the main thing is to have the rope that connects the weighted pulley bar to the actual warp beam taut enough to really hold the weight, but loose enough so that the warp beam isn't totally stopped because of too much friction. There has to be a functioning friction rate, that is to say, it has to be tight enough to keep the warp taut, but not so taut that you can't advance the warp from the weaver's bench without getting up to loosen the rope, advancing the warp beam, and re-tightening. There really is a happy medium. Silly that I just didn't understand how it worked exactly, but wonderful that I know now!
And it is that firmly-woven web that I'm thinking about now...the cloth is 60/2 essentially woven firmly...it's drapey, but in the way that waistcoat fabric might be drapey - it's not the drape of the same thread woven at 48 epi (which was the sett for all the 2002-2003 broken twill tallitot I wove then), which is very scarflike and almost slinky. But it's a wonderful hand, with a little bit of what the French refer to as 'carte' (an almost papery quality to the firmly woven taffetas) that I love.
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