A Myriad of Mistakes

Forever to get started, but going well now!

I warped my inkle with 10/2 cotton on Friday night. This stuff is very, very fine. I’d had no idea. I had forgotten that, like wire gauge in chain maille, the larger the number, the thinner the yarn, and this is the thinnest yarn I’ve ever woven with. As in, one short step above sewing thread. As in, I was worried about whether or not the pattern I had chosen would even manage to fit on the loom, and I need not have worried. Fully warped, only a little over half the peg space was taken up, and it’s by far the largest warp I’ve put on the loom, with 56 warp ends. Had the yarn been thicker, there is no way the loom could have done it. As it is, I didn’t include borders because I thought for sure the warp was too big.

I have always been a fan of smaller over larger when it comes to some art mediums. Smaller usually means more detail. For instance, in beadwork, one can do it with size 6/0 beads, but if you use the (much) smaller 11/0 beads, details are clearer and sharper. Or, for the IT-savvy folks, it’s like smaller pixels.

I had not, however, planned on moving to thread this small so soon. When I placed the orders, the only thing I was thinking about was that it would be thinner than 5/2 cotton. I guess it’s fairer to say that I knew it would be thinner, but not how much so. For whatever reason, it didn’t click in my head that 10, being the double of 5, meant that one thread is at least half the size of the other.

The colors, though, are so vibrant and pretty, that I shoved all my misgivings down the garbage disposal, hit the on switch, and ignored their screaming as they spun down the drain. I had plans.

I kept coming back to this Celtic knotwork pattern that I really, really wanted to try. The pattern chart was different from the charts I’ve been using up till now, so clarification of the new method and number of threads was my first email for help. That done, I sat down to warp the loom. It took me two hours, because I was trying something else too: multiple colors of background warp threads. I wanted a gradient from dark to light in the center, and back to dark. My pattern threads would be another color.

I hmanaged to get that done, and headed out to the living room.

One of the things that drives me bonkers about our house is its darkness. It’s an older, Colonial style home, and they don’t run to a lot of windows. During the day, depending on where I’m sitting, I still need a lamp on. At night, obviously, lights are on, but they aren’t close enough to the sofa to shed good light. My answer was to buy a rechargeable clip on light. It gets the job done. So I curl up on the sofa with my loom and phone with the PDF pattern and prepare to get started.

This is a much more complicated pattern than I have tried before. My previous practice bands, at their most complicated, were made up of small motifs and only 32 warp ends, plus borders. This one, without borders, is a huge jump up in complicated, then you add in the size of the thread –or lack, thereof — and what you end up with is me, cursing myself up one side and down the other, but still determined that dammit, I am going to beat this. And so I did, but it took two solid days, much screaming at the sky, and numerous emails and messages for help. I am so glad that Laverne is so accessible! There is no better help than being able to call on the person who published the pattern in question!

I wove four rows. It didn’t look right at all. I wove several rows more of plain weave, intending to start over further down the warp. Then I messaged Laverne the first time. She told me I started out ok, then went off track by one column and continued in that vein.

I decided not to leave the errors in place, went back and unwove everything back to the beginning — why waste the warp space? And I started again. Wove four rows. Unwove four rows. Wove them again, and unwove them again. And again. And again. And…

Every time I did these four rows, there were threads at regular intervals that were never being pulled into the weaving, and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried weaving them in different ways and only ended up with different threads that weren’t getting caught.

By this point, I was several messages into asking for help, which finally clicked this morning. Holy Toledo, Batman! But I finally have progress moving forward, and am well past those first four rows now, with the pattern forming beautifully…except for one thing.

I wanted the pattern to be subtle again, as in the previous copper and gold practice band, and I made my color choices with that in mind. However, I think I went a little too subtle, with the darker pattern strings being a bit too close in color. In the center of the band, the pattern is easily visible. Toward the outer edges, well, you have to work a little bit harder to see it. Still, all in all, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s going.

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Andean Pebble Weave

Working through different motifs in the book

As I mentioned last time, trying this new technique has helped my brain to focus more than it has been since the quarantine started. I haven’t been bouncing off the walls, mentally, nearly as much. So when I’m not crocheting or playing Animal Crossing, I’m working my way through Laverne Waddington’s book Andean Pebble Weave.

Laverne does her pebble weave on a backstrap loom, which makes it really portable. My house, currently, is not fit for backstrap, because I’d be sitting on the floor, and all four of my Arctic dogs are well into a summer coat blow. There is no escaping the fur, but sitting on the floor is just asking for trouble. Especially since the younger dogs take that as an invitation to jump all over me, which is not very conducive to weaving. So, I’m using my inkle loom. I have no idea if the way I have it set up is proper for pebble weave, but it seems to be working. As my dad always said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I had started with the first project in the book using a very thin weaving cotton I’d bought several years ago. Long enough ago that I no longer have the tags that told me what brand or size it is, so it could be as long as nine years ago. Who knows? But though it was going well, I quickly cut the strap off. It was so tiny that I was having trouble with the weaving of it. I warped the loom again, with DMC satin floss, which you might remember from previous posts being used for tablet weaving. I doubled each warp thread and got to work. And though it can work, satin floss is very fiddly. It’s slippery, for obvious reasons. It might have worked better had I used some other material for the weft, like I did with the tablet weaving experiment, but my weft this time was also satin floss.

What is woven on the front, is woven on the back in the contrasting color

That warp went away too.

I went back to the original weaving cotton, and decided that to make it easier for me to see, I would simply double the warp threads again. Then I realized, the inkle loom I was using wasn’t wide enough to carry the warp comfortably. Every time I had to advance the warp, I’d have strings slipping off the sides.

I brought out the big guns: Moya, my beautiful first inkle loom from Northwest Looms. She’s nine years old now, and still as beautiful as ever, and more than capable of carrying this warp. What I didn’t count on was the fact that for the first time, I would have to remove her right side in order to put a warp on her. I’d always used those tiny skeins of embroidery floss on her before, so warping with both sides on made sense. It couldn’t be done that way with large cakes of yarn. Off came the side, and I got a warp on her while video chatting with an old friend.

Once I started weaving, I realized that, though it works almost perfectly, I’d forgotten one thing to make it perfect: I didn’t double up on the weft thread.

Oops.

With the weft thread being half the size of the warps, there’s less separation between picks, which means that the little dots, the “pebbles”, are all but impossible to see. Since they’re such a huge part of the pattern — it is called pebble weave, after all — it won’t be right until I double up that weft. For now, the warp remains, and I returned, once again, to the smaller inkle loom, which I proceeded to warp for a wider band. Although I didn’t double up warp threads this time, for some reason I seem to be managing better, even though the yarn is so thin.

The big guns: Moya. You can see that she’s bigger than the piano stool!

This is the slowest type of weaving for me, because almost every bit of it is warp manipulation. I am not fast with that, in part because the yarn is so thin and the lighting in my living room isn’t fantastic. It reminds me a lot of fingerweaving (yes, I do that, too), because you basically hold the warp in both hands and transfer the needed strings from one hand to the other, keeping some and dropping others. I’m sure other weavers are a good deal faster than I am. I don’t mind being slow with this. I kind of just…enjoy the journey, and watch the pattern appear. It’s fun. And I certainly have time right now!

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