I wove up a few more samples, and wet-finished the first one.  Here is the front of the first sample, wet-finished:

And here is the back:

You can see the long floats where I had problems with shaft #24.  But more on that later…

I then decided to see what the color progression would look like when woven.  Here is a portion of that sample (the rest is wound onto the cloth beam, and I don’t want to disturb the weaving-in-progress by unrolling it):

Here you can see a progression from gold/turquoise weft down to fuchsia/red – the final set of squares does not belong to the color gradient but is an experiment to see whether I liked starting the yellow against the fuchsia warp (instead of red against fuchsia).  Preliminarily, I don’t like the combination, but it is intriguing enough that I may weave it up to see.  For this warp I am worried that the turquoise weft combined with the gold weft will produce large areas of low contrast between warp and weft, resulting in “plain blue” and “plain yellow” squares.  I am not sure whether that will work in this shawl or not.

At this point I had reached the limit of what could be simulated with samples, and I was eager to get on to the “real thing”, so I started weaving the “real” shawl:

The  color gradients are not really visible yet, but I expect them to get considerably more visible in the next six inches, in the fuchsia warp anyway: that weft is headed rapidly into purples.  The red is tinged with orange, but the real progression to orange occurs in pirns #12-18, so not as much change there.

All this is beyond my ability to simulate using Photoshop, so I’m “weaving blind” – it’s too complex for me to visualize in my head, so the only thing to do is weave it up!

Which brings us to the weaving part.  Shaft #22 and 24 are giving me conniptions.  Shaft #22 now rises all the time unless I shove the compudobby box as close as it will go against the loom.  Fine.  I can do that.  However, now shaft #24 refuses to lift, because the solenoid cap (the little U-shaped thing) is rotating until it no longer “cups” the wire when retracted, but presses up against it instead.  The end result is the same as if it refused to retract – the shaft stays down all the time.  I managed to weave about eight inches before it started its antisocial behavior, but since then it’s mostly been weaving and unweaving.  Unweaving is an incredibly slow and tedious process because there are two layers that need to be unwoven, so it takes double the time.  I have now made some adjustments to the loom, and we’ll have to see whether that improves matters.  As soon as Mike gets up I’ll take it for a test run.

Dye-wise, I am still doing samples and experimenting with my process.  For some reason, at pH 5.0 the red dye simply will not exhaust.  I am going to drop the pH down to 4.5, take out the leveling agent, and see whether that works any better.

Between the weaving and the dyeing, I’m starting to get frustrated.  I have the patience of Job (or can at least fake it when necessary), but to have major setbacks on two projects at once is incredibly frustrating.  I sure hope the last round of loom changes fixes the problem and I can get back to weaving!

Off to the dyepots!

It was an exhausting long weekend – the first two days were spent setting up the BBQ, having the party, and cleaning up.  By the time Saturday and Sunday were over, I was feeling reclusive and fiber-deprived, so I spent all day Monday working obsessively in the dyepots and over the loom.

And here is what I have!

Much to my surprise, my best-guess sett turns out to be correct, and the results, on the top at least, are lovely.

Alas, the results on the bottom are not so lovely:

Kind of hard to make out, but you can clearly see the skips in the orange/yellow layer, where blue is peeking through.

I think I understand what the problem is, but not (yet) how to fix it.  I’m weaving with 1/3 twill background on the top and 1/3 twill background showing on the bottom, which of course means that I’m actually weaving a 3/1 twill on the bottom.  This means that I’m weaving with nearly all threads lifted, which is (generally) an invitation to skipped threads.  I have a mirror adjusted so I can see the bottom of the cloth, but the lighting on the bottom is  poor and it’s difficult to see skips as they happen.  I tried lighting the bottom layer to make things more obvious, but to no avail.  I may re-adjust the mirror to show me the shed instead of the bottom layer – not the best of solutions since it means turning my head to check every single pick, but better than lots of skips.  If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m all ears.

That said, I am ECSTATIC at the appearance of the doubleweave blocks.  On the topside, it’s just beautiful.  And the two-shuttle weave is going nicely, too.  I had worried that switching shuttles constantly would be frustrating, breaking the natural rhythm.  But it turns out to be just a different rhythm – slower, sure, but not much slower than what I’ve been weaving lately!  And the results are worth the additional effort.

I have also made progress on dyeing the weft skeins.  Here is my dyeing setup:

I’m using Sandra Rude’s system, with loops of heavy copper wire in vinyl tubing holding each skein.  This makes it easy to lift the skein out of the dyebath without tangling the skein or burning your hands, and is a handy place to hang a tag, too.  Once the skein is out of the dyebath, it gets labeled and hung to dry.

Here are about half the skeins, almost dry:

Not a huge difference in color, but it goes from a bluer red at right to a distinctly orangey red at left.  I’m using price tags to label each skein, and will label each cone as it’s wound on.

I now have a lot of meticulous work to do.  The pattern did not come out quite as I wanted, so I’m going to have to rework the pattern in Photoshop to make sure that it comes out right.  This entails quite a bit of tedious point-and-clicking, which I am not looking forward to, but hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, right?  So tonight I will continue weaving samples to see if I can get both layers perfect (or near perfect), and tomorrow morning I will rework my patterns in Photoshop.  I may  also play around with color gradients in the weaving, which means winding a bunch more pirns.  Fortunately I have figured out how to wind a small piece of watercolor paper (rough on one side) into a pirn of sorts, or I would be buying 56 pirns just for this one project!