WEIGHTED WARP ENDS

I beamed on the warp this morning.  This is the picture from the front of the loom showing the weighted warps.  At this point I had only about six more inches to wind on.

The white strings hanging from the top of the loom have loops in the bottom.  Through these loops I thread my floating selvedges so that they raise and lower more easily the way I want them to.

I now have the warp ends removed from the top of the loom and thrown the the heddle frames.  I am reweighting them so that I can easily get the lease sticks moved up close to the heddles in preparation for threading.

The raddle is still sitting on the back of the loom.  I will not remove it until I am done threading and sleying.  If then.

PRAYER SHAWL RADDLED

Swollen throat, hoarse, headache—reactions to a strong antibiotic.  Called doctor and she took me off of it.  Whew!  Had been given it for bronchitis (why? almost 100% of the time bronchitis is a virus).  In any case, have not had had it now for a few days and the antibiotics have been much worse on me.  So, to celebrate my no longer taking it, I thought I would practice my singing, no.  Sob. I decided instead to wind the rest of the shawl warp. 

Then, having done that I thought, why not raddle it.  After all, I’m still alive.  And I’m not light-headed any more.

So, here is a photo of the raddled warp as seen from the back of my loom.  If  you look carefully at the table at the front, you can see that the end loops of the warp, slipped through a metal bar, are lying on it.  It is ready (tomorrow!) to be dropped to the back beam so the winding on process can begin.  Currently masking tape attaches it to the table so that neither human nor cat can easily upset the thing.

If you look at the top of the loom, to the right of the warp, which is thrown up over it, are the 9 weights I will use to attach to the warp to make for even beaming on.  Each color section will have its own weight. This is my version of a warping trapeze, and it works just lovely for shortish warps.

Tomorrow I will set that up the weights and then I can beam on.  Or maybe, pretty-please-with-sugar-on-it, I will be able to sing????

USING TWO RADDLES

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

Note on colors:  These are not the real warp colors. The real colors are reddish brown and khaki green.  Whew!  The point of these photos is not to get accurate colors…..

I had read somewhere about a weaver putting a second raddle at the top of her/his loom before beaming the warp on.*  I thought this was an excellent idea and determined to try it out myself on my next warp.  So here it is.

First, a picture of the back of the loom as I was in the process of the first part of raddling.

 

This first view is from the back of the loom.

On the back my 4 dents per inch home-made nail raddle is visible.  A very amateur job of nailing, but it works.  At the top of the loom on the castle is a Harrisville raddle with 1 dent per inch divisions.

The newspaper keeps the unraddled warp ends from falling into the raddle spaces and getting tangled.  The little table is for my back rod to rest on until I am ready to attach it to the back beam.  Two little pieces of tape are visible holding it onto the table.  That is what I do when I leave the loom to go do other things.  That helps keep the rod from being knocked who knows where.

Viewed straight on from behind:

The next view is from the front of the loom. When I wound the warps, I put each bout in an individual sandwich baggie.  Then I grouped several bouts together in larger plastic bags.  Doing this has resulted in a warp I can handle without threads getting all tangled up.  Kitty is wondering if all this is really worth it.

I am now ready to beam on except for removing the choke ties near the castle.  Since my bouts were slightly less than one inch wide, the choke ties have no relation to the inch divisions of that raddle and would only choke everything up as they tried to pass through the raddle.

This process has already revealed to me a problem which I corrected.  One of the warp ends was very very loose and when I followed it through to the lease sticks I discovered that it had somehow gotten tangled and there would be no way those ends could pass through the lease sticks.  I fixed it.

Related Post:  Another Raddling Tip

*My apologies to the person whose idea this was.  I have no memory of who gave me the idea, or even whether the idea came from a weaving blog or from a weaving list.  If anyone would like to share the name of this weaver with me, I would be most grateful.

“Using Two Raddles” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on February 24, 2010. ©2010 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.

Another Raddling Tip

I discovered quite accidentally another way to make the raddling process easier. I had put the ends of the bouts in clear plastic baggies. The purpose is to keep the warps clean and the bouts separated. However, in the past I had discovered that they tended to slip out of the baggies and get messed about anyway. This time I used potato chip clips to hold them. When I put the bouts over the top of the loom, I let out enough of the warp from their baggies so they would almost rest on the loom bench, but not quite. I.e., the bouts were weighted by the potato chip clips.


Here the bouts are actually resting on the bench at the front of the loom because I have done with the raddling and am ready to move on to winding the warp onto the back beam. While I was laying the warp ends into the raddle at the back of the loom, however, they were suspended over the front beam but above the bench, with those red potato chip clips serving as weights. Those weights gave the warp just enough tension to make separating the ends with my ever faithful crochet hook much easier.

Once I am ready to start winding the warp on, however, I will add much heavier weights to the bouts. From my experience, it seems that the warps should be wound on with at least as much tension as I will use when I am actually weaving.

Raddling Tip for Multi-Colored Warps

When I wind my warps, I wind rather small bouts. Usually these bouts are about 2 inches to 3 inches wide. That is when I am working with 60/2 silk. Small bouts in such fine slippery yarn beam on much more smoothly and easily than wider bouts. With this crackle warp I am making bouts about 5 1/2 inches wide. It is mercerized cotton and 20/2 in size. It will be sett at 30 epi. This is in contrast to the silk which I sett normally around 60 epi.

When I make the bouts I always label them, 1,2,3 etc so that I know in what order they are supposed to go on. Where I would get stymied, however, is in trying to figure out which way each bout supposed to lie when I slip it onto the lease sticks.

One day , for no particular reason, I decided to leave the counting string at the cross in when I took it off the warping board. I usually took it off and reinserted it whole through the cross. I noticed when I was dropping the warp ends into the raddle, that sometimes the string at the counting cross where the lease sticks were, was sometimes tied off at the right, sometimes at the left. This didn't make much difference to me except that it was more awkward for me when the string was tied off at the left. But then I just cut it at the right and continued laying the warp ends in the raddle spaces.

When I started winding this current warp, I figured something out. I realized that when I took the warp off the board the tie at the cross would always be knotted on the same side. That meant I had to watch the placement of that knot when I put the lease sticks through the warp ends in preparation for raddling. Once the bouts themselves were in the proper order, all I had to do was make sure that the knots were all on the same side.


Here are two of the bouts on the lease sticks. The red yarn are the marking yarns I put on as I wound the bouts. On the right side are the loops that I made when I tied them on the warping board. On the warping board those ties were always made on the same side of the bout, the side facing me. Here I have arranged them on the lease sticks so that they face to the right. Since I work from right to left during this process, having them face right makes sense. The warp colors here, by the way, are quite accurate, at least on my computer screen.

Why is this so important for me? It is important because often my warps are multicolored and the ordering will often be random enough that I can't tell or remember by looking at an individual bout, just how the colors are supposed to go. If I don't get the warps put on correctly, the arrangement of the colors will not be what I had planned.

Problem solved.

Crackle Jacket: A Different Path?

4:00 am. I woke up. I woke up with the image of those oyster shells vivid before my eyes. Frequently when I am planning a project, at some point I have a change of heart. Sometimes this happens in the middle of the night. It happened last night.

The startling blue and gold which stood out so brilliantly against the darkish neutrals. The splatterings of black. I started thinking of having an occasional black warp. Maybe I could have it repeat at regular intervals against the irregular size blocks. Or maybe a colored warp that I dyed black in spots. Maybe both.

How would I do this? The solid black threads are no problem. But the colored warp with black spots. Well, I could separate out threads and paint them. Oh dear, we are talking dyeing cotton and using MX dyes. I've used MX dyes but I have never cared for them. They are the devil to wash out and the dissolved dye keeps for only a few days. The acid dyes, on the other hand (which I use on silk) are easy to wash out, assuming that there is even any excess dye to wash out, and the dissolved dye keeps for ever. The last means much less mixing of powders. Both more convenient and less exposure to the danger of breathing in the dye powders.

Ahh, but there are some warm or hot water reactive dyes. I've not used them myself, but I know people swear by them, and so in my head I am thinking of going to the ProChem site and checking that out.

And then I start thinking of what I might do with painted warps if I turned the draft so that the treadling became the threading and the threading the treadling. This raises all sorts of new ideas, especially for warp painting possibilities.

STOP!!!! Enough already. I begin to realize that these shells have inspired a second project, not a change in this project. After all, the intent is an easy-to-wear cotton jacket for spring summer and fall (in South Carolina), casual enough to wear with my khaki's, but just slightly dressy enough to wear with linen skirts and pants. Whew. Back to sleep.

And today I have to make notes of all this so that I don't lose my thoughts from the wee hours of the morning.

By the way, the blanket warp is now fully covering the width of the loom and ready to weave.

I think an unwoven warp is a lovely thing.

What you see at the back of the loom, by the way, is my raddle. I usually always remove the raddle before starting to weave, but leave the lease sticks in. When I was in Santa Fe I learned that the Mexican rug weavers left their raddles in. I asked, why? The response was, why not? Then my friend Leigh tried leaving her raddle in and found she liked weaving that way. So tried it, and removed with fear and trepidation the lease sticks as well. I discovered that I liked that also. And, even though I had removed the lease sticks to help with finding a broken warp thread, I realized that the raddle would still make it quite easy to find them.