Site outage and temples

You may have noticed that the site was down for most of yesterday, the result of a botched DNS update.  I’ve corrected things and everything should be OK now, but please let me know if anything else looks wonky.

Despite a trying day yesterday, I did manage to get some things done this weekend:

• threaded, sleyed, and tied on the painted warp
• wove a short header, and am currently debugging the painted warp
• set up my new copy stand for photographing/”scanning” the magazines

I also experimented with a wooden temple.  Up until now, I’ve been using paperclip temples, but someone suggested that a wooden temple works better.  So I bought one and am using it on my warp, like so:

Thus far I think I like the paperclip temples better – the wooden temple is trickier to place and blocks my view of the fabric – but I am persevering, because these things often get  better with practice, and I think it probably does do a better job of holding the fabric edges out to reduce draw-in.

I am also pleased to say that the registration marks seem to be working out nicely.  Here is the warp on the loom:

Right now they are nicely lined up, and so is the warp.  We’ll see what it looks like after some more weaving – last time I had trouble with the bouts “taking up” at different rates.  I think I’ve fixed that problem, but only a test run will say for sure.  Fortunately, I had the foresight to leave plenty of warp at the beginning for testing – nearly a yard of white warp that I can weave up as a test.

Plans for this week: do the sampling and take the various measurements necessary to create the knitted blank; knit up two blanks, one for each panel; start scanning the magazines.  I am deliberately not planning on doing much weaving, because someone is coming by on Saturday to see my loom (she is thinking of purchasing an AVL WDL).  I’m not sure what she will think of the Frankenloom that is currently set up (with the trapeze, live-weight tension, LED loom lighting, enlarged back beam, etc., mine is not exactly a factory-configured AVL), but she should be able to weave on it and get a feel for how the AVL WDL works and how it fits her body.  Which is at least 50% of what matters.

Anyway, because she is coming over, I don’t want to weave up the entire sampling section of the warp before she arrives – that way she can play to her heart’s delight without worrying about screwing up anything “real”.

And now, off to prep for work!  Today’s the first day of my new job, and it will be interesting to see what transpires.