Still Warping Up

The warp is sleyed and tied on. This is the view from the back of the Megado. The eight repeats with their coloured heddles are clearly visible

And this is the front view.  Since taking this photo I have uncrossed four or five crossing threads in the reed and sorted out the tension. I think I will re-tie it. The heddles are crammed together because of there being 60 ends to the inch and the advancing twill pattern which means several threads on the same shaft are close together. Doing repairs is no joke when the threads are so close together.


Apart from this, I have cooked, organised the family to do the Christmas tree, hung up the Christmas cards, finished the present wrapping and started the brioche dough. Brioche stuffed with oxtail tonight. Oh and I helped my son-in-law, Robin, to make sausages. We tried them for lunch - excellent.

I had a Christmas present today - three samples of donsu which is Japanese polychrome silk damask. It is so fine, it is nearly transparent. When Christmas is over, I shall examine the samples with a microscope and work out how they are done. The one on the right has gold thread in it. This was obtained from 'Tea Passage' , a tea ceremony company in the States who sell the Japanese wherewithal to make some of your own things for the tea ceremony. These samples are intended for creating shifuku which are little bags to hold the tea caddy in. I failed totally in my attempts to buy some donsu directly from Japan but I am happy with what I have acquired as it will help my researches.

Now I must make the gravy for tomorrow's lunch and check out all the other food. I hope everyone reading  this is enjoying a domestic celebration though I fear some others may not.  I always make sure we support the Salvation Army at this time of year in the hopes that some homeless are helped as a result.

Warping Up (6)

Anne and family have reached their destination not without trauma. Their car broke down within 15 minutes of their destination and they ended up taking a taxi. However there they are, hopefully warm. The Kuala Lumpur lot have moved up their travel plans and are arriving a day earlier (tomorrow). So I turned out the spare room yesterday. And our car had to be taken into the garage this morning but all is now well.

Although all is not well on the Megado front. I need to describe what I usually do and the implications (only apparent yesterday) of the method used on the current warp. Up to now, I have occasionally used only the first few shafts but mostly I have used a point twill over all 32 shafts. Even with the double stitched cloth, the back cloth was on Shafts 1 to 4 while the front cloth was point twill on Shafts 5 to 32. I  threaded up either a whole point (60 threads) or a half one if doing double stitched cloth. Then I tie them up. But this automatically includes thread(s) on Shaft 1 so the tie up hangs free at the front. This time, a repeat is 172 threads on 32 shafts and each section is 20 mm wide, holding 44 threads. A bout for each section is therefore sensible and there are 4 bouts to a repeat. But this means only one bout has any Shaft 1 threads in it. The other three bouts are hidden in the middle of the shafts. I did not think about this until I had threaded up two whole repeats at which stage I decided that I would include a dummy on Shaft 1 in every bout and then the tie-ups would hang freely at the front as above.

I finished all the threading yesterday and started sorting out the bouts, discovered that the six 'hidden' bouts, that is, those without any Shaft 1 heddles, were in an awful state. The tie-ups had been rubbed by all the shaft-lifting , there was quite a bit of pilling and two of the six bouts had monstrous pilled knots of 44 threads.  By putting on Michael's jeweller's headgear and using the point of a needle, I got them sorted out with only one thread broken off short about 6 inches from the end and that was easy to lengthen. I must check the threading in those bouts because I may have unthreaded the odd heddle in the disentangling process. Then I can sley it at 60 epi in a 20epi reed.

The moral of all this is that each bout needs a Shaft 1 in it.
This photo shows how easy it to check the threading. The draft is an advancing twill so each shaft is one up or one down on the previous shaft. All my heddles are colour coded. The colours run in four batches of eight, white, pink, orange, brown, yellow, green blue, violet. After years of usage, I don't even have to think about what colour comes next.

Daryl Lancaster has pointed out that her yarn that I admired is from Cherry Tree Yarns who have the most scrumptious yarns. UK suppliers are The Woolly Workshop,  
and I Knit London (who have a shop near Waterloo). The yarns are knitting yarns and I would have to see and feel before buying for weaving but the colours!!