This evening I am celebrating that I finished winding on the warp for my next project: fabric with JOY’s Almaza in quite a vibrant colorway. The warp is muted shades of colors from the cool side of wheel–somewhat greyed blues and purples, with an occasional stretch of an almost bright pink. I wound 16″ of this in 2″ sectional pieces, 6 yards long. The vibrancy will come when I add the very bright peach painted weft.
I did encounter a problem–due to my hasty math. I have three hanks of this colorway and should have made the warp 5 yards long in order not to exceed my 3,000 yards of materials (each hank is 1,000 yards long). However, in my excitement to get started, I left my warping wheel set at 6 yard length. Ahem…. I realized my mistake after the first 2″ section was wound. I quickly revisited the math and saw that I would come up 456 yards short! Yikes! I quit for the day then and decided to sleep on it….
My warp would be narrower than I needed for fabric. I wanted fabric 16″ wide for my project. I was only going to get 14″ now since every thread was a yard longer than it should have been. When I woke up the next morning the first thing I thought about was adding some single colored warp threads to get the full width I needed.
456 threads out of a total of 3,456 is 13% of the warp. I decided to add these threads to the second back beam on my AVL dobby and then mix them evenly into the main warp when I thread the pattern. I need an additional 72 threads added to the 504 threads already wound on. The solid color threads are medium grey and, as I mentioned, will constitute 13% of the total warp. I hope it will look good! It was my best guess on how to get the width I need!
By the afternoon I had the the smaller warp on the supplemental beam–just 12 threads each in six sections. Since tomorrow is my last day here, and I have plenty to do to close up this house ’til next May, I will have to leave threading ’til I return.
The weave structure I’ve chosen is an overshot lace that I found in the book 60 Scarves for 60 Years from the Weavers’ Guild of Greater Baltimore. It was designed by Carol Bodin especially to use with a painted warp. Her project uses a solid color weft, so I am really looking forward to seeing how my project will work with a painted weft in an entirely different colorway….it will certainly be an exciting project to come home to!
After bringing both warps around their back beams and putting in the lease sticks I tidied up my studio so it will entice me to get to work when I return. Bob and I headed out for our last walk along the CT River until spring. It is the first cold day of the season here, and the sky was a clear winter blue with large fleecy clouds. Two sights surprised us. First, there were two big draft horses with an open carriage on one of the quiet residential roads that leads to the river. I guess these horses were giving carriage rides in the center of town earlier in the day.
And a last good bye to the sheep who live on the corner of the street that leads to the river. They aren’t too sure about Bob and me, so every time we try to take their picture they generally run for cover into the barn! All our photos show them running away!
We’ll be running away ourselves on Monday. Future posts will look much more tropical.
