A bit of weaving

 With the tie-up done, tensioning sorted (for the moment), and a warp threaded and sleyed, it's time to do some weaving!

I tied up so the center two treadles are plain weave, and the four treadles around them are set up for 2/2 twill.  So from left to right, they're shafts 2&3, 1&4, 2&4, 1&3, 3&4, 1&2.  It's a little weird, but it means I can alternate feet while doing twill, everything is centered, and there's enough space between the sides that my feet don't run into each other.

My current warp is 11" wide, 12 ends per inch, and of a grey wool.  It's what I used for testing on my Leclerc loom, so it's a good comparison.  Here's a short piece from when I was working on it on the Leclerc:


Just ignore that some of the warp is black, there:  that yarn turned out to be terrible for warp, and I broke a lot of strands while I was working with it.  For this I'm just using the grey.

While working, I've run into a couple of problems.  The big one is that, as I feared, the shed is a little bit too small near the front of the loom.  Unfortunately, I'm going to have trouble finding a significantly smaller shuttle, I think, so I'm probably going to have to try some larger heddles.  Right now they're 10 1/2", and I'm thinking of trying 12 1/2".

The other problem I didn't expect is that I'm having trouble beating lightly enough.  On the last loom, I was getting 12-14 ppi with a reasonable strength beat:  on this one, I broke 20 ppi while feeling like it was about the same effort.  A lot of that is that the beater is much heavier, and swings from the top rather than the bottom, but it's an interesting change.  Here's a sample with the newer loom:

Sample from new loom, with much tighter weave than the first picture.


As you can see in the plain-weave section, it's a lot tighter.  If you look at the twill section (the diagonal lines), you can see the lines are closer to a 35 degree angle than 45, which means I'm still beating too hard.

I also keep hitting the wrong treadles, but that will come with time.  Part of the problem is that I misread my tie-up diagram and thought I'd tied it differently, part is just that I don't have the muscle memory of where the treadles are yet.

Tune in next time, when I do a lot of math!

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