Two steps forward, one step back

This morning, a triumph!

I got the tabby warp – wound, painted, washed, and dried – onto the loom. I beamed it back to front with a trapeze, and it worked beautifully and went on fast. I only broke five threads of the 140/2 silk while beaming, and could happily ignore them since I had wound an extra 25 threads in case of breakage. (When working with painted warps, I find it easier to wind an extra thread or two in every inch of warp, and simply swap in the thread whenever I break an end.

Here’s a photo of the beamed-on warp:

The warp beam looks totally empty, but there’s actually seven yards of warp on it! It’s such fine silk, though, that it takes up no room at all.

Then I went to put the lease sticks into the pattern warp. Somewhere in the back of my before-coffee brain, a spark of suspicion started to grow…wasn’t that pattern warp looking an awful lot like the tabby warp?

I checked, and sure enough, I had dyed a second tabby warp instead of the pattern warp. You can see the difference here:

The white thread in the center is the “real” pattern warp. On the left is what I thought was the pattern warp, and on the right is the tabby warp. You can see that the left and right sides are the same size yarn, and the center yarn (which you can barely make out, unfortunately – white on pale brown isn’t the easiest thing to photograph) is heavier than either.

What this means is that I will have to re-wind and re-dye the pattern warp before I can start threading. Zounds! Will Our Heroine ever get this warp on the loom?

Tomorrow morning I fly to Maryland for the memorial service, so there may be a break in blogging for a few days. I’m still hoping to get this warp on the loom and ready to weave in October…so I can weave those exciting first few inches before chocolate season arrives in full force.