The Never Ending Warp

When the guild had to move from our old guild room 2 years ago, we were putting all of our equipment and supplies in storage.  That meant we did a ruthless clean out of stuff that we thought could be easily replaced, or that we'd had in the room for ages upon ages.  We'd offered these items up to members and amongst the offerings were several warps which were chained and forgotten, or not used.    This was one of those misfit warps.  It was wound of 2/8 cotton, 143 threads and get this, 12 yards long!   Those 143 threads would work out to about almost 6 inches wide.  That means that this was a 12 yarn long mug rug warp at the very best, or perhaps someone wound a warp too wide and this was stripped off.   Regardless, it's a bizarre size.   If it was meant to be 6 inches wide, that would make a an awful lot of mug rugs or skinny scarves.

It looked to be in decent shape, for threads of an undetermined age.  It's two colours, rust and beige.  I find that combo rather uninspiring and a bit dull.  However, I found some khaki and turquoise in my stash that add a bit of interest to the original colours.  With those, I figured I could do something useful with the warp.

I've been trying to work something out with this for a while but it's too long to deal with inside the house. There is also the kitty factor, because trying to do anything to a 12 yard warp with 4 cats would be slightly insane.   I don't think they'd sleep through that effort.  Well maybe the old guy, but he's 16 and doesn't wake up for much if it doesn't include food and pets.

I took the warp outside, hooked one end on the garden gate post, stretched it out and walked it back to hook the other end on the same post, effectively doubling the warp.  Now it was 286 threads - getting better.

There was only a cross at one end, but the choke ties were done in slip knots, so I slipped my fingers in between the one part of the cross, thinking that half a cross was better than no cross.   I walked backward, and undid each choke tie as I got to it, separated the warp, retied the choke tie and moved on to the next one.  When I got to the turning point, I added a tie to denote the centre point, and moved back to the beginning.  It wasn't perfect, but at least it's something.

 This is the folded area.  I put extra choke ties in to try to help the threads from not getting tangled up and more difficult to deal with than necessary.   Luckily it's a simple colour arrangement, looking like a smaller rust strip beside the beige.

At this point, I reached in my back pocket, took out the scissors and snipped the warp in half.   There was no way I was going to weave off 12 yards of anything 6 inches wide.  Now I have almost a foot wide and I only need to wind off another 4-8 inches of threads to make the warp wide enough for something useful, like napkins or tea towels. 

As well, it's only 6 yards long, which is a less daunting size to deal with.   I'm thinking a tabby weave.  While I prefer twills, I'm not sure I want to risk that much more thread on this.  While I snapped the threads in a few places to test for strength and it seemed fine, there is still the risk that the cotton has weak spots, which would make for some miserable weaving.

Off and On the Loom

Done and done!  The sparkly scarves are off the loom.   They look pretty good if I do say so myself.   I'm happy with them.   I measured up the second similar warp I'd wound; the one that I'd thought I'd made a mistake on.   It turns out that I did indeed wind the whole warp incorrectly.   I had intended to tie it on to the warp still on the loom.   I didn't feel like rewinding it right then.  What a mess that would be - putting it back on the warping board, skeining it up and then winding a new warp.   So, instead, I set it aside, cut off the remaining warp and started putting the blanket/cloak warp on. 

That one is the green warp which I'd tried to dye brown, but only managed to get a splotchy darker green.  It's actually a nice colour green and I can live with the splotches.   The project is using double weave.  That means dressing the loom with 2 layers at once, and in this case, attaching them at one side.  I'm using the left side since that is where I get my best selvedges.   If I can find some fishing line, I'll run a heavily weighted floating selvedge on the left side, to help minimize the draw in where the two layers join.

I put in a single stripe along one side.   I did make the mistake of winding it with the skein of green, when I'd already wound and dyed that bit of green.  So I pulled out the undyed green and have added in the dyed bit.  I got it right since the added in green bit matched numbers exactly with the red.    It will be a bit of a pain to pull the undyed green out the rest of the way, but if I do it slowly and as I go, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

I've never done double weave before for a whole project.  I've sampled a bit during a guild meeting.  I've read about it.  I've watched a couple of videos of which some were good and some were rather iffy and not horribly useful.   However I think I've got a reasonable idea of what I should be doing.  It's going to take forever to dress the loom and thread those heddles.  Gosh, I've been threading for what seems like half the day and have maybe 1/5 done.  Of course I'm checking my threading each inch or so, which takes a bit more time.  I'm hoping that saves time in the long run. 

New to me bands I've discovered -  The Dead South, Poor Man's Poison and The Haunted Windchimes.   Something new to listen to while I'm threading heddles.

Lots of cotton, a little wool

I've finished spinning the 100 g of natural green cotton.   I'd forgotten to divide it up in half before I started spinning, so part way through, I took 50 g off the end of the sliver and hoped it was good enough.  Sometimes the labelled weight is a few grams off, or more than a few, which can make a difference in the spun yardage.   In this case though, I had only a 3 yard or so difference in bobbin yardage, so all was good.  

The light skein is 227 yards of 2 ply cotton before it was wet finished.  The darker green is 345 yards of the same cotton after wet finishing.   I simply tossed the skein in a pot of water and simmered it for about 40 minutes.    I so love the colour changes with coloured cotton after wet finishing.   Be aware though that white cotton can turn off white or tan after simmering.

I put some roving mill ends, which I'm pretty sure are superwash BFL with a bit of nylon on the Minstrel.   I am doing some natural dyeing on the long weekend in May and thought maybe I could get enough spun for the dye pots.   Just in case, I'm going to hunt down some commercial white wool yarn as well.    I'm planning on having 4-6 dyes going, using several different mordants and maybe some after dips for colour changes.   We'll need a bunch of yarn for all that.

Our weaving/spinning guild has to move.   We've got almost everything packed up but decided to thin out a bunch of our stash.  We had 8 stacking bins of stuff that no-one had touched in years, as well as a huge tote of donated bits.   I was looking at a bag with a warp in in, wondering what I could do with it, when Judy gave me another bag and said here, this one says 2 warps.   They came home with me, since I'd been complaining that there is a 4 x 8 sheet of formica on the floor in front of my warping board, so I can't wind any warps.

Only one warp was labelled and it was with an approximate end count.  The other 2 had no labels at all.   No wonder they sat in that bin for ever.  How could anyone figure out what to do with them, with no info!  This morning  I counted ends and measured yardage.   They are all different.   One is probably 2/8 stark white cotton, is 11 yards long and would only be wide enough for mug rugs.   11 yards of mug rugs - eek.     The next one is only 3 yards long but has 298 ends and finally a 6 yard warp with 208 ends, in what looks like mercerized cotton.  It's not like I can even mix them together to make something wider because of the length differences.  The 11 yard warp has a cross only at one end, or I could have easily cut it in half and doubled it up.   Right now it's really only wide enough for mug rugs and really, who would want to do 11 yards of mug rugs.