After a light spin (only 45 minutes in Zone 1-2!), I finished up my workout, took a shower, and went back to my weaving. I experimented with a couple twills – some with sections of plainweave, some skipping every other treadle, as Bonnie suggested in her book. It was fun to play with the different patterns, and quite soothing after a high-stress day at work. However, my twills were coming out elongated – I had sett the warp at 24 ends per inch, which was a bit too close together – there wasn’t quite enough room for the weft to go over-under over-under the warp in a nice relaxed manner, making the resulting fabric warp-faced (mostly warp showing). I thought about this for awhile, since I really didn’t want to give up the rhythm of the weaving to re-sley the reed at a different, wider sett.
Eventually I reached the obvious conclusion that, as much of a pain as it would be to re-sley the reed, it would be even stupider to go through the entire set of exercises at the wrong sett – not that I wouldn’t learn a lot about how to work with design in a warp-faced fabric, but that wasn’t really what I’d had in mind. So I cut off my initial work, took it off the loom, and re-sleyed the reed at 20 ends per inch. I’m hoping that this comes out better.
I actually enjoyed re-sleying the reed. I like creative work, but I also like precision handwork – it’s why I love working with fine threads. There’s a mindless joy that comes in working with your hands. It’s what I like about knitting, even complex pattern knitting. The reason I’ve never gotten into drawing or painting is that it’s simply not tactile enough to suit me – I like running things like silk and cashmere through my fingers and just enjoying the process.
The samples are coming out very nicely – the rough, relatively thick cotton shows up the pattern well. If I can just get it to a balanced weave (equal warp and weft showing), I’ll be a happy camper.
Sorry there have been relatively few posts of late – work has been pretty high-stress. Hopefully it should abate in the next few weeks, though.
