I am struggling to get to my blog at the moment, drowning as I am in a wave of to-do lists and deadlines. Nonetheless, weaving continues and as promised (threatened?) I am mixing my purples and my greens in a new Theo Moorman project.
My idea for the ground warp was very simple — mainly green with regular narrow stripes in purple — so I wound it without any careful plotting, stopping when I thought I probably didn’t have enough yarn left for more. I beamed it and got it ready for threading before I started on the tie-down warp, also very simple: half the number of ends and all in one colour. It was only when I started putting the tie-down warp in the raddle that I suddenly remembered how fiddly the whole thing can be…
Adding the second back beam, handling those fine flyaway yarns at such a low density, dealing with two sets of lease sticks — it all suddenly seemed like a rather elaborate undertaking! But the tie-down warp wasn’t metallic, which was a big mark in its favour, and all went on without any trauma.
Speaking of the lease sticks though, I’m a person who likes them strictly horizontal. I really don’t like those arrangements where they hang from the castle, but prefer to have them supported at the ends. For this reason I always use the long lease sticks belonging to the Delta even when I am warping the Megado — they are wider than the Megado so I can just rest them on the sides of the loom. When I am threading up the Delta, I rest the ends of the sticks on two scrap bits of hardboard that came wrapped around a reed. And when I am using two sets of lease sticks, I raise one set above the other using a couple of those random bits of wood which lurk in the studio (these originated as display props — little white-painted triangles for leaning things on — and they still serve that purpose too, when required). A few strips of masking tape hold it all together.
And once the warps are all in place, it’s really quite satisfying.
Oh, wait. I still need to weave it, don’t I?
I’ve just started.
I’m using handspun for the inlaid yarn again. In fact it was the skein of handspun hanging on my wall of yarn which made me warp up in the first place. This is turning it to be one of my favourite ways to employ the fruits of my spinning: I might even spin a bit more, with Theo Moorman in mind. In this case the end goal is cushion covers.
“another excursion with Moorman” was posted by Cally on 7 April 2013 at http://callybooker.co.uk
