Warping Failure to Launch

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DO YOU WANT TO SEE A TOTAL WARPING FAILURE?


If you said "Warp, yeah!" read on!

To continue learning about weaving I decided to make a scarf on a table loom at my parents'. I measured out an 8 yard warp of 140 ends figuring a sett of 10 epi with this unknown dusty pink wool from Grandma's stash.

Things were going well.

Then I took the warp off the warping board, adn things started to go not well. While I had tied knots around every 10 warps, the ties seemed a little too far away from the end of the warp to keep them together. I also realized, once I put the warp on an apron rod, that I had no idea which warp ends were the edge of the warp. I did my best, and then thought I'd try to beam teh warp (this process of warping is new to me. The last time I warped front to back, not back to front, so I didn't realize that I had to keep all the ends in sequential order at the end of the warp as well as on the cross). When I started beaming, I realized that the warp was super - I mean just incredibly tangled.

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So I aborted the mission and decided to wind it into balls and put the warp back onto the warping board.

Thankfully, my mom loves to untangle things, and was happy to help me. We listened to some funk music and untangled from 9pm to 1am. We got about this far on the first night:

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I managed to do a bit more the next morning by myself, but there was still a lot left to untangle. I think it took about three days of both of us working on it until pretty early in the morning to get it to a spot where I could finally wind it back up.

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THINGS I LEARNED FROM THIS:
  • Winding a warp is slightly different if you're warping the loom from front to back than if you're warping it from back to front.
  • It's probably not a great idea to start measuring the warp at the cross
  • While I know how to chain a warp, I have no idea how to un-chain a warp when beaming
  • The direction you chain the warp is important! If it doesn't chain the right way, it won't un chain when beaming the warp!
  • Raddles are pretty nifty!
  • When warps are looser, they'll pack a weft tighter

So the scarf is going to be a pink warp with a black weft. I'm just going through The Handweaver's Pattern Directory and weaving any twills with a staight draft until I get bored of the way they look, and then weave some tabby in between. That was the plan, anyway.
After all that work to unwind the yarn and de-tangle it and re-measure it, and beam it, I finally sat down to weave it.

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And I found a threading error once I started weaving with the black yarn. I knew it was going to drive me crazy to see that threading error for 8 or so yards, and I hadn't actually woven that much, maybe two inches. So in the end, I decided to cut off the small amount I'd already woven to re-thread the heddles after that section (thankfully, it was towards the end of the warp, so there wasn't much to re-thread, mabye 30 or 40 ends?). That did end up fixing the issue. Once I got going, the weaving actually seemed to go rather quickly. Sadly, I had to leave before I could complete the proejct, but I'll pick it up again once I get back to my parents.' Here's some great images of it:

Rhody weaving

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