CONES OF BROWN SILK WARP

Posted by Peg in South Carolina 

Three of them.

I decided to try winding from the other end.  Magic. 

Perhaps not.  This has happened before.  So this time, I tried to watch the silk as it came off the skein.  Hard to do as I have to keep my eyes glued to the cone to make sure the yarn doesn’t slip off the top or the bottom.  What I saw when I grabbed glances of the skein was that the yarn was unwinding back and forth across the top of the skein.  This explains the advice I once received to unwind from the top of the skein.

This advice had made no sense to me.  When I wind a skein of yarn myself, I wind, say, 100 rounds, then put three or four ties on.  I wind another 100 rounds, and twist the ties and encircle them to encompass the next group of yarns.  And so on.  The result is that when I make balls or cones from my skein, the yarn winds off the skein from one edge to the other……….gradually.   Not back and forth across the top.  And it makes no difference which end I start with.

Clearly the method of making these silk skeins is quite different.  The winder simply goes back and forth and back and forth and then the ties are put on.

With this kind of skein it truly does make a difference which end I start with.  If I start with the end that comes from underneath, I am in deep trouble.  If I start with the end that comes from the top, all is well.

At least, these are my thoughts right now!

So, why three skeins?  Because I plan on using a paddle and winding my warp three ends at a time.

PHOTOGRAPHY NOTE

Yes, the background color of the photo is a putrid gymnasium green.  That is because I had to do some serious color manipulating to turn what the camera intrpreted as red, on all 15 photos I took, to the brown it really is.  Here is the original image (and this is the least red of the images):

There is, of course, a lot of red in this yarn.  Well, the camera lens apparently fell in love with the red and didn’t pay any attention to the other colors in the yarn that turned the color into brown. No matter what settings are tried on the camera itself.  Sigh.

Related Post:   Coning the Warp Yarn

"Cones of Brown Silk Warp” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on November 19, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.