The Mending is Done

I have spent the last two days with a heavy focus on examining the crackle fabric for flaws. Actually, there were not really many of them. There were three shots (each in a different place) where the entire length weft had to be rewoven. That took a fair amount of time. But the result is that there are no doubled weft ends. That I like.

Then scattered around there were a few places where the weft thread had skipped over some warp ends it shouldn't have. Though there were only a few, it took concentrated time to find them. There were two small ones I left as they were. I decided that the mending would look worse than the error because of the doubled weft threads on either side of the skip.

I suppose that in the case of these short skips I could just have rewoven the whole row. If I were submitting this to a juried show, I would have had to have done just that. I think that the garment I make out of this fabric will be just fine without having done that.

There was another error that happened with some frequency which has not happened to me before. I found little loops of weft thread. I had used end-feed shuttles so that should not have happened. And as it clearly did not happen all the time, I must have had the tension right. So I am not sure what caused them.

To correct them, though, all I had to do with those was to draw the offending thread tight with a blunt needle, pulling and tightening till I brought the loop to the selvedge. This is tedious to do but the result is that there is no flaw in the fabric. When mending isolated overshots, I may be correcting an error, but I still have a flaw which I will have to try to avoid when I cut the pattern out.

I am so delighted and relieved to have this part of the finishing done.