WEAVING BEGINS…AND SO DOES UNWEAVING

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

After throwing four shots with the handspun weft in pseudo plain weave, I went on to weave in the pattern. I treadled everything exactly as I was supposed to. The fabric looked like window screening. That is to be expected. After I had woven about 5 inches I realized something just was not right.

The nature of the yarn and the window-screening effect combined to make it difficult to see what was going on. But when I looked carefully I saw that the pattern that was supposed to happen simply was not happening. Yet I was treadling everything correctly.

Then I compared the written tie-up with the treadle tie-up. Whoops. Not the same. Though the treadles with correct tie up were there, they were not in the order that written draft specified.

My first thought was to change the treadle tie-ups so that they matched the tie-ups as I had them in PixeLoom

My second thought was to open PixeLoom and move the treadles to where they were supposed to be. I went with the second thought. PixeLoom’s move tool makes this ridiculously easy to do.

The first draft on the left shows the original drawdown. The top draft, called the initial draft, is the basis for the draft I created, which is the bottom draft. That original draft created a heavier fabric than I wanted. In the bottom draft, called the final draft, I have repeated the treadlings were only single shots were thrown in order to give a little space and air to the fabric.

The problem came when I treadled those treadles!

Here is how I re-ordered the tie-up and treadles. The second draft shows the re-ordered tie-up and treadling. The top draft is still the original draft; the bottom is the draft I am actually using for the shawl.

My only concern is that I might get confused when I actually start weaving. The spaces between treadles represent treadles which are tied up, but not for this particular weave. So I will be skipping treadles when I weave. Time will tell.

Having taken care of the tie-up and treadling, it was time to settle down to the actual unweaving. I carefully unwove about 40 shots of weft yarn, down to the initial pseudo plain weave beginning. To do this, I cut the weft yarn and wound it onto a spool that fits into my LeClerc boat shuttle. After removing 4 shots worth of weft, I started winding, then put the spool back into the shuttle and unwove 4 more shots. Removed it, and wound what I had just unwoven. And so I continued.

I could not use my Bluster Bay pirn and shuttle because there was no way I could wind that pirn correctly by hand.

So now I am ready to begin. Again………….

Related Posts:
Unweaving
Into Every Life…
Unweaving and Weaving
Pirn Winding

“Weaving Begins…and So Does Unweaving” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on March 5, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina