Rep Warp Challenges

This poor photograph is of the page in my notebook that was the start of my errors in my first ever bit of rep weaving. I was planning on doing a simple 4-shaft sampler by Rosalie Neilson. I calculated the number of ends necessary and then the warp yardage required for a three yard warp.

Then I turned the page, did some more work, and that night returned to wind my warp.

Unfortunately, I used the "warp yardage required" number and wound 3x the number of ends I needed! Arrgh! It only goes to show you that late at night is NOT a good time for me to work! Arrgh!

On the positive side, making mistakes like this is good. I spent more time in weaving texts and online to figure out how rep works, and now I'm weaving a pretty piece that I wouldn't have tried otherwise!

This is a rep pattern from Strickler (#309) with a modification to the borders. My heavy weft is an 8-ply yarn that I wound together from a yarn in my stash. It's an odd, boucle-esq yarn and some of the loops poke up through the warp. I'm pretending that it's ok and am calling the piece "red, white, & blue". My next sample on this warp will be with smooth yarns.

















And just so I don't forget: There were challenges getting this warp wound on the back beam. The warp advanced so slowly through the lease sticks! At first I thought it was due to the high density of threads since this is a rep warp (24 epi....the yarn measured 14 wpi).

However, that wasn't the case. Check out the angle of the lease sticks relative to each other. I tied the lease sticks to the loom by wrapping the tie around both sticks. The right side of the sticks are close together and slightly pinching the warp threads. I'm calling it the "chopsticks effect". Deep sigh. I have learned another thing to avoid!