long-warping

before i start . .

i've got internet at home! yay!

i finally bit the bullet and paid BT £122 to connect my line.

anyway, back to the point

this is related to the 100-scarf a week project.

yes! that's right! i have not given up! i am just slow as all funk!

so, yeaah. here's the thing. say each scarf is 1.25 metres long. then if i want to weave 100 scarves at 2 wide i need to make a warp, say 70 metres long. a little bit more maybe to be on the safe side.

as you can see, if i weave at 2 wide, then i can't really reasonably expect to make 100 scarves in a week. cos weaving the count of yarn i like to use at 1 metre an hour is reaonably hard work. and 70 hours reasonably hard work in a week quickly becomes extremely hard hard work.

so i need to weave 3 wide, which would leave me at about 40 metres or so. i need to do more sums. but that's about right. and that's doable. i reckon. but i don't have enough heddles. yet

anyway, that's another story.

the main thrust of this post is how i intend to make a long warp. this is how:

outside.

there's no other way really. my house is too little to sectionally warp in, and there's no way i'm spending any more money on warping equipment. so i have to do it outside. the great problem with doing this outside is that it's windy as anything up here and doing anything remotely delicate is a near impossiblity unless you have shelter, of which there is little as trees this far north are the exclusive preserve of toffs and plantation-farmers.

anyway, i live by the sea. which is nice, cos i like to swim. and i was walking on the beach, which is made of rocks, the other week, thinking away about how i was gonna warp outside using the natural environment as my warping frame, when i ran across an unusually shaped hunk of wood. having been so far bereft of inspiration i arbitrarily decided that this was a Sign (despite having been a confirmed Atheist since the age of 14, i am unable to rid myself of superstition) that i should sit about on the rocks and have a think.

And there i saw it: a sea barrier!

see, up here there's sea barriers in bits along the coast, which are basically wire boxes filled with rocks, which are all slabs up here, thing being the way they are. and these ones were arranged in three steps, each almost the height of a man. so i decided to have a look at these, and it occured to me that if i were to jame sticks in between the rocks, they'd stick out at 90 degrees and make a warping frame. and blow me down, there right on a rock right there was a small collection of sticks, of the kind they use to seperate planks at the builder's yard. you know, the kind that's really easy to break and nice and rectangular.

so i jammed them in, and lo and behold, a warping frame! made out of sticks shoved into a storm barrier.

so, just so you know and for my own self-motivation, i'm going to make a 30 metre warp (for experiment sake) 2 scarves wide (that's 900 ends) anbd weave it up and see how it comes out.

if i haven't posted the results within two weeks i whole-heartedly encourage you to pull me up about it, with the aid of capital letters, which as we all know is the internet equivalent of SHOUTING!

thanks for listening

-hb