Weavolution is in alpha!

Holy schlamoley, Batman, we’ve got real live users!!

And a boatload of bugs.  At this point, that’s to be expected.  I’m just hoping we get them all worked out in time…launch date is coming up hard and fast, and there is a LOT to do between now and then!

Needless to say, I am pretty incredibly busy right now. I feel like an octopus playing Twister, trying to stay on top of it all!  (Remember, I also have a full-time job!)

But I did manage to get a single 25-yard bout of 60/2 silk wound onto my sectional beam…only 23 more bouts to go!

I am trying something new out on this warp.  Bonnie Inouye had suggested to me that I use plastic clips, sold in bags at Ikea in the kitchen section under the name “Bevara”, to hold my extra Texsolv heddles when I took them off the loom.  So I did, and they worked great!  Having tried them with the heddles, I then thought, “What if I tried holding the cross with these?”  So I clipped them on and locked them shut.  They are holding the cross securely, and I slipped them down the warp until I could tuck them between sectional dividers on the warp beam, which should keep them from interfering with the next section as it’s wound on.

Someone asked about threading.  I don’t have any secrets, though I noticed at the workshop that I seem to thread faster than most.  I generally treadle the threading, as I find it’s slower in the short term and faster in the long term (far fewer threading mistakes!).  However, this particular warp will be threaded up straight draw, and I can do that faster by hand than by treadling the threading.  To make life simpler, I have color coded the heddles on each shaft, in groups of four: shaft #1 has red heddles, #2 has yellow, #3 has blue, #4 has green, then #5 is red again.  The colors repeat every four shafts.

So for each group of four shafts to be threaded, I will select one heddle on each shaft, spacing them out so they are roughly  in the same order in which they will be threaded.  I’ll then take four threads one by one from the cross, hold them between the fingers on my left hand, and then thread them rapid-fire through the selected heddles with a hook held in my right hand.  The left hand feeds the threads to the hook and all the right hand has to do is draw the thread through.  (This is not original to me; it’s how Peggy Osterkamp teaches threading in her books.  I can’t recommend them highly enough!)

This is really easy to do for straight draw – normally I would treadle the threading because on a 24-shaft loom it’s not immediately obvious which is shaft #12 and which is shaft #16, even with my four-color coding scheme.  But this four-threads-at-a-time method is practically made for straight draw on this loom.  My color-coding scheme means that every first thread falls on a red heddle, every second thread goes into a yellow heddle, blue on #3, green on #4.  If it gets out of that sequence, I know immediately I’ve made a threading error.  And once I finish one group of shafts, I just pull out the heddles from the next four shafts.  It goes very quickly.

Which is a very GOOD thing since there are 2,304 warp threads in this cloth!

Off to bed…tomorrow, another four hours on Weavolution before starting my “real” job!  It’s a good thing I have lots of energy.  I’m going to NEED it before I’m through!