Wednesday, November 11, 2009

WINDING THE HANDSPUN WARP

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

To wind the handspun warp I converted two skeins of the handspun into balls. Not cones.  Balls.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Winding from balls is jerky at best.  Winding from cones is smooth and easy.  I knew this.  So why, why, why did I make balls?  With my cone winder it is just as easy to make cones as it is to make balls with my ball winder.

Well, there were not many ends, and I just wanted to see if I had been wrong about the balls.  If my experience had changed.  Nope.  So, to wind bobbins, I will convert the remaining skeins to cones.  I may even convert what is left on the second ball to a cone.

Cone/ball issue aside, there is really only one major issue to confront when I make a handspun warp.  The stretch factor.  Handspun has lovely resilience.  That means it stretches and bounces right back.  That means that when I removed the warp from the warping board, I immediately lost eight inches.  Sigh.   And I had tried to be so careful to wind the warp tautly but without stretching it.

I did make allowances for the stretch factor when I worked out the figures.  I’m not totally dumb!

Related Post:  Spinning for Weaving 


"Winding the Handspun Warp” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on November 11, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.

2 comments:

Delighted Hands said...

Did you put the balls under a clay pot to tame it-works good when they are prone to bouncing around. Keep with it, soon you will hit the weaving mojo and it will be good.

Peg in South Carolina said...

It's not the bouncing that is the issue, it is the way the yarn pulls off the ball. If I pull from the center, it tends to come out in clumps, so I don't do that. And if I pull from the outside, it catches on itself.