Saturday I finished winding the 120/2 silk onto four cones, ready for warping. This afternoon, I completed the samples I was doing for my WeaveZine article. Which means…
…yep! It’s time to launch into sampling for the dress fabric.
I’m not making the same mistake I made earlier, by making a sample too small to predict the finished fabric. So this sample will be 12″ wide, with a 3-yard warp – enough to try several different setts and see what works.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation using Ashenhurst’s Formula suggests that the correct sett is about 86 ends per inch for this particular weave structure. Egad! So I was weaving 60/2 silk at a sett (96 epi) that would have been too dense even for 120/2 silk! No wonder I was having problems.
At any rate, I am winding this warp at 84 ends per inch (7/dent in a 12 dent reed), and will go up and down from there. At 84 epi, 12″ wide is about 1000 threads, so it will take me some time to thread up and sley; I expect to finish it on Tuesday or Wednesday. So stay tuned, hopefully there will be pretty pictures in my next post!
Ah – the sweet smell of progress! 😀
Cheers!
Laura
Tien, remember that the sett that will work for 12″ will have to be widened just a bit for wider fabric. The wider the fabric the ore difficult it is to beat closely, even with a temple. So when putting on the final warp, allow for that and also perhaps just a bit of fine tuning of the sett.
I am very much enjoying watching your learning process.