Daryl's Blog – Page 142 – The World from a Weaver's point of view!

One thing led to another…

Of course nothing can go as planned… That would be too simple….

I got up early this morning to continue re-upholstering the rocker. Of course there were numerous interruptions, my son’s friends were hanging about, and my daughter and husband were here, and there was some lovely Sunday morning conversation happening, but alas, not much opportunity to work on the rocker. That would be anti-social?

Eventually everyone went off to do their thing, and I settled down to work on the rocker. I got the base fabric on, and I’m so happy with how it looks. The corners are tricky to cut, I always struggled with the corner cuts, even in upholstery class, but I managed to do a pretty good job. When I got to the back of the chair, I started with the muslin cover first, but as I hammered in the tacks, the lower part of the back frame split in a serious way, requiring much glue and overnight clamping. And I’m running out of upholstery tacks.

So, since I can’t do anymore work on the rocker, I decided to visit my attic stash, and my daughter who is always up for an adventure, decided to come with me. So we pulled down the attic stairs, and ventured up above into the rafters, stepping carefully, and located my box of decorator trims and braids. Most of what I have is the simple gimp braid, leftover from other upholstery jobs, none of it in the right color, and lots of trim with galloons and tassels, which aren’t really suitable for the trim on the rocker.

Now I have two choices. I can take a trip to Calico Corners, and see what trims they sell, or, I can see what kind of inkle trim I can concoct. 🙂 The second choice immediately appealed to me, since it was Sunday afternoon, and it was much more fun to design something in the studio than get in the car and drive to a store…

First off, I didn’t have a free inkle loom, and I wanted one of the small ones, the Inklette by Ashford. I want this to be really portable since I’ll probably have to weave 8-10 yards, I don’t want to drag the full size inkle loom around. Which meant that I had to clear one of my inkle looms before I could embark on another project. Fortunately I was really close to the end of the Splash yarn band I’d been weaving, and I set about to finish off that band. It is really pretty, and the supplemental cotton cable yarn added a lovely dimension to the piece.

Meanwhile, my daughter at 16 still likes to hang out wherever I am in the house, especially when I’m in my studio. She is preparing to give a talk to our weaving guild on Wednesday night, on the Lucet, a Victorian braiding technique, and she is scrounging through my studio to find interesting yarns to use on her larger inkle loom for dog leashes, shoe laces, and anything else she might be able to sell at the guild sale.

While I’m trying to finish off the Splash band, she is tearing apart my studio, rearranging my bins, and ooohhhhing and aaaahhhhing at every ball of yarn she pulled out. Brianna is attired in a total clash of pinks today, so she was quite the sight amidst all those balls of color!

Once I finished off the inkle loom band, I started to hunt around for yarns that might work for trim for the rocker. I grabbed a stiff card to try some wraps. I needed the trim to end up about 1/2″ wide.

I tried a couple of different combinations, rayons, silks, and a gorgeous skein of Linen.

I warped the loom pretty quickly, about 20 minutes to warp a couple of yards, and I started to weave. The first few inches looked a little tweedy, and not very interesting, so I tried playing with a pick-up pattern. I wanted to create more of a diamond effect to coordinate with the diamonds in the upholstery fabric.

Once I settled on the design, this trim wove up pretty quickly. I’ll take my little loom down to my neighbor’s house for our weekly viewing of Desperate Housewives, a neighborhood tradition, and I’ll see if I can’t get a couple of yards done while I’m watching TV.

If you live in the Northern NJ area, and are interested in a class in inkle weaving, I’m teaching a one day class next Sunday at the Newark Museum. They have looms there, and I’ll have a couple of the Inklette’s for sale, it isn’t too late to sign up, and it is a small class so you’ll get lots of attention.

Inkle Loom Weaving
with Daryl Lancaster
The inkle loom is portable, easy to warp, easy to weave off,
and makes beautiful belts and bands. Starting with a Power-
Point presentation, participants learn to make heddles for
the loom, follow a draft and warp the loom. Proper techniques
for weaving a tight even band with good selvedges
will be explained. Participants can finish a small project by
the end of the day. Inkle looms provided or you may bring
your own. All levels
Sunday, November 8, 10 am–4 pm
Member: $72, Non-Member: $80, Materials: $15

A day of remembrance…

Today is Halloween. My kids are almost grown up now, my daughter worked all day in the kennel, and wore cat ears, and my son went off to a party, I don’t think he was dressed as anything. The days of my Halloween costume mania are gone. Though I did spend an hour or so this morning trying to talk my friend on the phone, who lives in the next state, through some complex problems with the Halloween costume for her son. He was going as Max in Where the Wild Things Are. I was tempted to just hop in the car and drive an hour to help. I sort of miss those days a little bit. I made some pretty cool costumes, my favorite was the one I made for my daughter, who after I made it refused to wear it, she was so scared by it. My son wanted to be a knight in shining armor, so I asked my two year old daughter at the time if she wanted to be a princess to go with my son’s knight in shining armor, and she said in her poutiest voice, “No, don’t want to be a princess, want to be a fire breathing dragon!” So a fire breathing dragon she was… (My son wore it for the photo since she wouldn’t)

I went out early this morning to the grocery store, to pick up the candy. If I had bought it earlier, I would have probably eaten it. So I picked up 6 bags, what was I thinking, it was pouring rain and we don’t get many trick or treaters anyway. But I had to pick up a bag of my favorite Halloween candy, “Mounds”. That would be dark chocolate covered coconut. My kids hate them, so I know any left will all be for me. They prefer the sweet Starbursts, Jolly Ranchers, and Sweet Tarts.

But today isn’t for me about Halloween. Three years ago today, my best friend, my mother-in-law died, in a nursing home, with my husband and I beside her. The irony of it being Halloween didn’t escape me. The hospice nurses were dressed like bumble bees, and after she took her last breath, my husband went to summon the nurses, and in they came, antennae bouncing, in their yellow and black striped outfits, and the absurdity of the whole situation still makes me smile. As I exited the facility with all of my mother-in-laws belongings in a laundry cart, I had to push my way through the nursing home lobby where a Halloween party with goblins, and Frankenstein, and mummies and ghosts were all milling around. Surreal is probably an understatement.

Sidebar: When my husband and I got married in 1978, my mother-in-law wanted to give us something special for our wedding, so she gave us a check to purchase a rocking chair for our first house. My husband and I, and our best man and his wife, who was also in my wedding party, use to frequent auctions, and pick up antiques, refinish them and re-sell them, if we couldn’t use them ourselves. Both couples had housefuls of antiques, and my husband and I had no problem filling up our first house (the one we still live in) when we bought it back in 1982. All four of us also took upholstery classes at the Vo-Tech school in Bergen County, back where we had our apartment. At one of the auctions, not long after my husband and I were married, we picked up a beautiful cherry rocker, that coordinated with some family pieces we had restored. Over the years, the rocker has moved around the house, but still, it has played a fairly important roll in our lives and those of our children. Now it sits in the living room next to the wood stove, and I love to sit quietly in the rocker and read, in front of the fire.

Sadly the upholstery on the rocker is showing its age. Back in May, when I flew to Seattle to visit my friend Robyn Spady, and we took a day trip to Portland, OR, I picked up a lovely upholstery fabric from a Mill End store, at a great price, and it has been sitting folded on the rocker since then. This morning, after coming down the stairs into the living room, for the 10th time this morning, I stopped and looked at the rocker, and I could hear my mother-in-law’s voice saying to me, “Daryl, this would be a good day to re-upholster the rocker.”

So that’s what I did. It took most of the day to carefully remove the braiding and the fabric, and the muslin cover because that was so dry rotted. The wood frame was starting to come unglued, and some of the wood where the tacks held the fabric was splitting apart. The rocker is showing its age. The padding was still in good shape, the springs seemed sturdy and have held up from our original upholstery job. Basically the muslin and the upholstery fabric just needed replacing. I’m half toying with the idea of making the gimp braid on my inkle loom. We’ll see how it all looks when I’ve actually finished re-upholstering the rocker.

I haven’t upholstered anything in many years. I found my tack hammer, which is magnetic on one end, and in the real world, a good upholsterer would put a handful of upholstery tacks in his mouth, and feed them in rapid succession to the magnetic end of the tack hammer with his tongue. At one time I had gotten pretty good at it, but I’m not trusting myself to be anywhere near competent to try this at home. And I do remember swallowing a tack once, back in the 70’s, it was the first time I ever appreciated Wonder Bread. By downing a number of slices, it created a dough ball around the tack, and presumably it is no longer in my body, or if it is, it hasn’t caused me any problems in 30+ years.

So instead, I just poured out a handful onto the tile hearth of the wood stove, and used the magnetic end of the tack hammer to grab and hammer the tacks in place. I ended up getting the muslin on the seat and the arm rests recovered. Pretty good for a days work.

While I worked, I put a pot of chicken soup on the stove to simmer, and I enjoyed the day, hammering away, thinking about my mother-in-law, wondering if she was alive today, what she would think of my kids, and their escapades, and where our lives have taken us in the three years since she died. I’m thinking about you mom!

A day of shopping…

OK, truth be told, I was not looking forward to this trip. For all of the reasons I stated in yesterday’s blog, plus I didn’t have a chance to bring work along, and I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do to entertain myself for a couple days in Atlantic City while my husband was at the convention center in sessions.

Just getting to sleep late in the morning was a treat. I didn’t have to get up and make anyone breakfast. Instead, my husband and I had a leisurely breakfast in a cafe in Caesars, and then he went off to a seminar. And I went shopping. This time I hit the ground floor of the Pier Shops, which I wrongly said yesterday that they were built over the site of the old Steel Pier. Well I was wrong, I found out later that the Steel Pier is still there, but about 1.5 miles down the boardwalk from Caesars. I felt a little better.

As it turns out, I had a wonderful day. Still would have liked to have shared it with a girlfriend, but I was able to focus on the task at hand, finding bargains, and seeing what fashion is out there, and I was wildly successful. First, let me say I’m not a shopper. I’m pretty cheap, and I’m pretty easy to fit, and have a wardrobe full of clothes, and because of the way I purchase separates, and coordinates, I have combination’s of classic clothes that can be put together with a handwoven jacket and I can always be in style. Or close enough for my tastes. I look carefully for quality pieces that will last a few years, and my policy is that for every thing new I bring in, something old has to go. So there is zero growth in my closet. Which is important because 60% of my closet is all my handwoven garments and artwork, representing about 30 years worth of work. It is a big closet, but not that big.

So, off I went to visit the first floor of the Pier Shops, and my first stop was to revisit Kenneth Cole and look at a vest I had seen yesterday, that I really loved for the styling and the detailing, and I thought about it all night. When I went back, I found it had been mismarked, and was instead, 50% off of $72, instead of $128. OK, that was a find. Next I hit Chico’s. Always a dangerous place for me, I go right to the sale rack. I tried on a couple dozen garments and ended up with five sweaters to update my separates wardrobe, all deeply discounted and I got an additional 25% off of the final price.

Next stop was Caché. I’ve never shopped in Caché, but I thought I’d check it out. I found a cute vest in denim, (I’ll take photos of the vest when I get home) on the sale rack in the back, marked down to $19. with an additional 50% off. I also found a couple pairs of pants. The fit was terrific. So I purchased three items from Caché, each priced at $9.50. Oh I’m going to have fun cleaning out my closet when I return!

I dropped my purchases in my hotel room, and headed toward the convention center, stopping at the outlets along the way, the first one I hit was Naturalizer. I new I was in trouble as soon as I spied the size 10 rack. First of all, I love the comfort of Naturalizer shoes. Kohl’s carries some, but they don’t often have my size, which is a 10. So here was a couple dozen pairs of Naturalizer shoes, in my size, from 50-70% off. I bought five pairs. And the total only came to $138. So I lugged my bulging shopping bags to the nearest Starbucks, and sat with my Chai Latte, and actually decided that this city wasn’t so bad after all.

I met up with my husband who was returning from the Convention center, we dropped my additional purchases in the hotel room, and then set out on the boardwalk, to walk the mile and a half down toward the Trump Taj Mahal, where we had to attend a couple of additional receptions. Instead of a pricey dinner, we got to munch on appetizers and get free drinks, and chat with people who are affectionately called October Friends. Meaning we get to see each other only at School Board conventions in October. I think the handweaving community has a lot of those types of friends. There are the Convergence friends, the regional conference friends, etc.

The weather was really lovely for a long walk on the boardwalk. The seagulls were everywhere, with their shrill eerie cries. I will say I adore the Jersey Shore after October 1st, the deserted beaches, the cold gray wind, the cries of the gulls, it is really like something from a Bronte Sisters Novel. Except it isn’t the moors, it is the Jersey version, the dunes.

When we got to the Taj, we were enchanted to find the old Steel Pier, still intact, an amusment arcade, a shadow of its former glory, and I remembered that a fire in 1969 wiped out a huge portion of the pier which hung out way over the ocean. It was like looking at a distant memory.

At each of the streets that Monopoly made famous, there was an enlarged placard that looked like a card from the Monopoly game, and gave some of the historical facts and features of that street/area.

Inside the casino, which has a definite Indian feel, we found a gorgeous 10 foot metallic embroidered fabric, mounted on the wall outside the ballrooms, I’m sure Indian in origin, but I so wish there was some sort of signage.

We head home tomorrow after my husband attends a morning session, I’ll head down to a quiet breakfast by myself.

I have actually enjoyed this mini vacation, there is a lot of history here for me, but I’m so rarely ever out shopping, that I am grateful for the time, and the opportunity and the very high end shops that were having some terrific sales, where I could entertain myself while my husband was doing his schoolboard thing. I already wore one of my pairs of new shoes, and one of my new Chico’s sweaters, a shade of Paprika with a large cowl neck collar that can sit a bit off the shoulder.

Stay tuned…

Atlantic City

My husband has been on the School Board in our district for more than 10 years. This is an elected position, and every three years we put up campaign signs and go to the polls to vote my husband back into a volunteer position for another three years. Because our district only goes up to 8^th grade, we send our students to a different district for High School. My husband is also a member of the board of education for that district as well.

The only perk, of endless hours of meetings and negotiations to try and do the best for both the taxpayer and for the students in our town, is the once a year trip to Atlantic City, for the Annual New Jersey School Boards Association Convention. Usually around the last week in October, I try to keep my calendar clear so I can attend with my husband, though gone are the years where the wine flowed and the food and entertainment were top notch. With budget cuts and schools struggling to pay for janitors and keep critical programs, attending events like this for many districts is unrealistic. Many board members end up paying their own way. The connections and the vendor hall, the workshops, and the discussions, are all part of the education process that makes a well informed board member. It reminds me a lot of a fiber conference, except there isn’t any fiber. Some of the vendor booths are interesting, but most are over my head or not remotely interesting to me, and I tag along with my husband watching him collect all the give-away trinkets and tote bags, pens, and novelties.

Sidebar: I grew up vacationing at the Jersey Shore. I remember Atlantic City, well before the casinos came to town, I remember watching the diving horse at the Steel Pier, the boardwalk, Captain Starn’s Restaurant where our family went every year, where I fed the seals, and learned to eat piss clams, not the cherrystones, but the one with the big fat tails. Real steamers. And I loved reading the street signs as we drove along following the Monopoly Board. I watched the slow decline of Atlantic City, the decay and the poverty take over, to the point where Atlantic was a depressed poor dangerous city to vacation in.

Enter the era of the casino. I have to say I have very mixed feelings about this place, and I am uncomfortable for a couple of days before I come down. I have great memories of a simpler Atlantic City, but that city is gone, replaced by one that is a towering monument to greed, and wealth, and to me, stupidity. It is fairly impossible to navigate to a hotel room or a hotel lobby without going through disgusting smoke filled noisy clanging casinos, where seniors in wheelchairs, on oxygen pour quarters into slot machines, hoping to win it big. My husband and I talked in the car ride down this morning, and his perspective was a bit different, there are many seniors who enjoy the bus ride down for $20. and they get $20. worth of quarters to play with and it is a day outing. I don’t understand it. But there are many that say that about my obsession with weaving and sewing. There are those that ask why I would weave my own fabric? Seems logical to me… 🙂

So, we are here in Atlantic City, it poured rain the entire trip down the Garden State Parkway. After the School Boards Association Luncheon, we checked into our hotel room, and looked at the view of the Atlantic Ocean from the 36^th floor of Caesars Palace. The storm was beginning to subside, turbulent clouds giving way to rays of sunshine. The rooms are gorgeous, of course, and I remember staying in Caesars last year and wondering why there was a remote control Velcro’d to the bathroom wall. I remember clicking on the remote and a TV screen popped up in the bathroom mirror. I think I near fainted. So this year, I was sure to get a photo of the TV screen in the bathroom mirror. So if you can’t get enough TV, not only is it in every restaurant, bank, and airport waiting area, but it can be put in your bathroom mirror as well!

My husband had an afternoon seminar to attend, so what did I do? 🙂 I went shopping! This is a huge outlet center, but I chose instead to venture out to the old Steel Pier which has been redone into a four story pier that has two floors of high end shopping like Coach, Movado, Michael Kors, Gucci, Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, Juicy Couture, Betsy Johnson, BCBG Max Azria, Kenneth Cole, etc.

The first shop I entered, and I was really wishing I had a girlfriend with me, was Eleganza, where I tried on a Catherine Malandrino coat, for $895. OMG! It was gorgeous, lace mounted over wool, huge shawl collar, the under collar a beautiful supple leather. And it looked like an $895. coat. I wandered through Michael Kors. I was sort of surprised at how the only colors I was seeing in any of the shops were not colors, but black, gray, and the occasional wheat. I saw the occasional plum or aubergine color, but mostly there was little color to be found. And the hobo bag is hot. I saw more hobo bags than I ever want to see in a lifetime, and none of them actually called out enough to want to come home with me. I am very happy with my orange leather Vera Wang I paid $30 for on sale at Kohl’s. I did look at one in a beautiful lime green, made of woven strips of leather at Michael Kors, and it was on sale, but the $495 price tag still was out of my reach. Actually, the only color I saw really, was in the hobo bags! Do you know how much weaving equipment I could get for that $495? Or another sewing machine?

In the end, I did buy an Indian scarf for $17 on sale at Ann Taylor, and a couple of short sleeve sweaters on sale at Banana Republic. They were only about $22. each.

I reconnected with my husband for the evening receptions and parties from many of the vendors our school district does business with. There are appetizers and food stations, wine and beer, loud music, and lots and lots of people. I always find it hard to have any kind of meaningful conversations in places like that, so I just sit, sip wine, and observe. I look at the décor, the clothing, the fashions around me, and as we passed from one of the receptions into another I got a quick glimpse of the beautiful evening gown displays from all the former Miss America winners in the Sheraton. Atlantic City was home to the Miss America pageant for many many years. So the memories and memorabilia here are strong.

Later on we gathered in the Gypsy Bar in the Borgata, to listen to a wonderful band, watch the beginning of the World Series, or as it is affectionately called here in NJ, the Turnpike series, if you aren’t following the World Series, The Phillies and the Yankees are playing each other. And NJ is stuck right here between the two great cities. I couldn’t hear anything over the band, so I looked at the décor, and noticed these gorgeous walls of amber liquids in clear bottles, and had to get a shot of it. On the way out of the Borgata I looked up and realized the lobby and walkways were decorated with Dale Chihuly chandeliers. One of the biggest one of his chandeliers I’ve seen is in the V&A in London, but there are many others, like the one in the art museum in Milwaukee. If you ever get a chance to see one up close, they are mesmerizing. The worm like blown glass tentacles, and flowers that explode from the globe-like shape seem like they are writhing and moving and glowing in the light.

Stay tuned as I explore more of this amazing fascinating city of hidden treasures and extreme wealth.

The Indestructable Structo!

This is the tale of two looms and a 19 year old who was into me for $300. The reason he was into me for $300. isn’t important, but as he is trying to work off this rather cumbersome debt, I’m trying to think of things for him to do besides clean my house thoroughly, which he has already done. I was going to set him to work on the outside gardens today, but alas, it has poured rain steadily through the entire day. So, that leaves something for me to invent for him to do in the studio. Enter two small Structo looms I acquired on my travels. The one on the right is an eight shaft, which had been refurbished, the finish is awful, but all the parts are there and in working order, except the aprons are cut way too narrow for the already narrow little loom. (For the non weavers, the aprons are the white cloth on the front and back beams that attach to the warp and the finished cloth.)

The second loom was also given to me, and all the pieces to it are sort of there, but many of the cross pins are missing and the loom frame had some creative copper beam replacements. This loom also had a hex warp beam with four two inch spools that fit snugly on the hex beam, and held a lot of fine warp. I unreeled one of the spools and pulled off about 20 yards. That’s a lot of warp for such a tiny loom.

I want to set up one of these looms to make more of the little Personal Post series postcards, I’ve had some luck with in exhibits. The cards themselves are only about 6 x 4″, so having an 8″ wide loom, with a long warp on it should let me weave for awhile and see what I can come up with, without tying up my larger looms. And the way they were perched on top of two spool racks as you entered my studio made for some dangerous snowball effects when one or both of them caught on someone’s clothing and went careening off their perch. But I digress…

I technically only need four shafts for the structure for the post cards, it is a Theo Moorman inlay, with two shafts for the ground, and two shafts for the tie-down threads. The problem is I need a lot of heddles. And as far as I know, Structo heddles are no longer made. Someone please tell me if I am wrong on this… Between the 12 shafts I have on the two looms, I have enough heddles for the job, and I can use 4 shafts for the ground instead of two, because I can. So enter my 19 year old. His assignment once he rolled out of bed at noon, was to dismantle both looms, and keep the best parts, and transfer 60 heddles to each of six shafts. Here’s the thing. Heddles, those little wire things with eyes, where each warp thread is threaded through, all have to face in the same direction. Or anyway in the perfect world they should. Older looms, where heddles have been added and taken away, tend to have a mismosh of heddle directions which is a pain in the neck to thread. So he worked for about an hour and a half, creating for me a nice eight shaft loom with lots of heddles, all going in the same direction.

Meanwhile, I pulled out the AVL warping mill to see if I could figure out how to wind warp on those little spools that fit on the hex beam. First the math. The Structo reed is a fixed 15 dent. The thread I pulled off the spools, was pretty close to a 20/2’s cotton, which is pretty fine. And from the quick count I did, they used that thread sleyed double through the reed, at 30 ends per inch. What I couldn’t figure out was how to put the warp on the spools to begin with. So I unwound each of the spools, like peeling paint off a house, there must have been about 20 different warps tied end on end. I got to the end of the spool, and found that the ends of the warp were all glued to some kind of paper tape that then inserted into a metal flange and the way the beam was wound, kept the paper from pulling out.

I dug around in my vast archives of stuff, and found my roll of paper tape, and grabbed the two cones I bought of 14’s linen, (from my trip to Silk City a couple weeks ago), which appeared to be pretty close to a 20/2 cotton, and a small cone of brown serger thread that matched pretty well. The serger thread is finer than sewing thread, and works well for the tie down yarns.

OK, I’ve never done something like this before, I use my AVL warping wheel for winding sectional warps. It came with a 20 dent reed, which is really odd, who uses a 20 dent reed, or so I thought at the time. Turns out that the actual space in each spool is 1 1/2″, and 30 dents in a 20 dent reed is 1 1/2″. How cool is that? (If you aren’t a weaver and are reading this, I probably lost you back on the first paragraph. Sorry, but this is one of those posts that gets kind of technical so you may want to just look at the photos and tune in another time to see what I actually do with all this!)

So I wound my 2″ worth of linen/serger thread warp into the warping mill, using the 20 dent reed, which meant the real width here was only 1 1/2″. Then I beamed one of the spools directly off the AVL mill, right onto the back beam of the loom, which is missing its entire castle housing because my son has it apart on my cutting table. You can see the band of thread coming through the 20 dent reed. Each dent has two ends of linen and one end of serger thread.

I used the paper tape and glued it over the ends to start(it’s the kind you just lick, do they even make that anymore? It’s used for taping up boxes, you can see the little roll to the right of the loom.) The paper tape held the ends really well, keeping the order, and slipped into the flange of the spool and I just started winding. The warp went on like butter, smoothest thing I’ve ever wound. The 15 yard warp beamed in about 3 minutes. I finished winding the warp by putting a piece of the paper tape over the ends coming out of the reed on the AVL mill. That kept my thread order and allowed me to move on to the next spool.

Everything went well until I got to the last spool. There was plenty of linen, but the serger spool wasn’t looking like it was going to make it. Of course it was my only one, and as luck would have it, Coats and Clarks discontinued it’s Tru-Lock serger thread, replacing it with something else, which didn’t come in that color, Chona Brown.

I had overwound the first warp for the first spool by a half dozen dents, so I had pulled it off and tossed it in the trash. Realizing I was going to be really close, and might make it to within the last half inch of warp, where I don’t really need the tie down threads, I went into the trash and pulled out this mess…

Actually, it was a lot worse, this was what was left after about an hour’s worth of work and having the dog come cruising through the little pile I’d pulled out of the serger thread. But perseverance is my middle name, after all I am a handweaver and that sort of goes with the territory. Most weavers I know would take a couple hours to undo a mess like this, and after the serger thread was pulled out and rewound onto the cone, I managed to squeak out the last warp spool on the loom with only the end 1/2″ with no tie down threads. Which is actually fine. The problem is, when I wound the last spool on the loom, the 1/2″ without the serger thread was on the inside not the outside of the spool. So I figured I’d have to do some creative threading, and maybe stretch some of the thread from other bundles, and anyway, it was time to make dinner.

My lovely creative pink haired daughter came into the studio after dinner and asked her usual, “Watcha doin’?” I showed her my dilemma, and she said, rather annoyed, “Mom, just rearrange the spools on the beam…”

Boy did I feel stupid. So in about 15 seconds, I popped the four spools off the hex beam, rearranged the spools so the missing 1/2″ of tied down threads is now at a selvedge edge, and all is well.

So, now I’m threading my loom, all the heddles are going in the same direction, and life is good. These little looms are a pain in the butt to thread, but I can put up with anything for 8″. I tossed out a 1/2″ of tie down threads on the opposite selvedge, so the two selvedges would match. I’m still not sure that the sett is appropriate for this fine yarn, in what I’m trying to do with it, but I won’t really know until I actually start weaving. So stay tuned!

If you want more information on the AVL warping mill, the AVL site has lots of information and I also cover it in my monograph, “Warp Fast”, which also covers sectional warping and warping with a paddle. The AVL warping mill works like a dream when winding the warping spools for the small Structo’s. And my little Leclerc Structo wannabee, that I’ve been using for the rug samples for the guild seminars, also has an additional hex beam with five warping spools on it for 10″ wide! Yippee! And I can more than likely get more heddles for the Leclerc.