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for crying out loud

Yesterday I decided to attempt to recreate a spiral twill i saw on stephanie's blog.

And, hooray! it's just a simple pointed twill, with warp and weft threads alternating one by one. ain't that simple.

What is slightly vexing however is that, having (as it turned out) threaded the heddles without error (through constantly rechecking everything throughout the whole process), i then proceeded, as you do, to Sley The Reed. Which is, i must admit, my single favourite part of the entire warping procedure. the rest of it being frankly tedious and footery as anything. Never mind that anyway

So, i finished sleying the reed, and stood up and had a cup of tea.


Sitting down again, i decided to finally tie on the the front stick and begin, upon which i discovered that

I'd sleyed the bloody thing back to front. and i never take the reed out of the beater bar because then i'd end up wearing the thread out of the wee holes the screws go into, cos it's all screwed down, not designed for the reed to be changed on a regular basis. So i had to take the whole bloody lot out and start again

But as i say, i like sleying the reed, because it's simple, and repetitive and there's not much that can go wrong, you just need to make sure you get the hook in the right dent, and that's simple as simon. So i got it tied on

Int at pretty? I hope you like my happy little weaving manny i've drawn on the castle, cos that's the closest any of youse in internet land r gonna get to seeing a picture of my face. See how happy i am with my shuttle? That's me that is. Anyway, happy little weaving manny finally got down to weaving with his happy little end-feed shuttles, alternating the colours in the weft as in the warp in a one-den-de-uvver pattern and a 12-forward, 12-back diamond twill treadling pattern. I don't know if i explained that properly, but the Result(!) speaks for itselfMaybe that doesn't come out too well on your monitor. It doesn't look very good in this wee editor window anyway. Needless to say, i am very chuffed with the result, and as i have a reasonable amount of that nice straw coloured yarn, i'm going to make a range of scarves based on this pattern and colouring, though i could change the blue for dark green, and will no doubt have to when the blue inevitably runs out long before the yellow does.

These are the considerations one has to make when one gets one's yarn from the town's charity shops.

Anyway, that's the way. I shall leave you with the Corries' rendition of Green Fields of France



Comments

Anonymous said…
Happens to everyone, or something like it! I'd like to say "it happens once to everyone," but. . .

That is a tempting twill!
22 September 2008 at 17:34
Andrew Kieran said…
it's turned out not bad as it goes in that wee sample. i don't think i have enough of that blue yarn left to make even one decent length scarf though, so i may have to find another yarn to go with it. i'm bound to have something in sufficient quantity to go with the straw yarn.

anyway, i can't seem to get any decent pictures yet, because i always finish working last thing at night, when there's no light, and the flash on my camera overcompensates and i don't have any decent image editing software.

however, the next priority is to tie up the big scary loom for countermarch treadling of a straight 2/2 twill on the current warp (sheperd's check from before, which was plain weave) so i can get that out of the way and put a nice long warp onto the large loom for making a whole rake of these scarves.

as it goes, that's the second time i've sleyed that particular reed back to front, definitely won't be the last
23 September 2008 at 10:16
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