Coverlet repair, Sampling, and Transparency

I received a surprising phone call the other day.  A woman had seen my work at the Athens Arts Gallery and was looking for a weaver's opinion regarding some family heirlooms.  We set up a time for her to come over and this is one of the things she brought--a piece from a coverlet that her great-grandmother had woven!

Even more amazing to me than the beautiful weaving was the repair job.  Do you see the faded blue rectangle in the middle of the photo?  It is a patch that was sewn onto the coverlet. ~The weaving studio at Conner Prairie recently had a reproduction coverlet that needed repair and this type of repair is precisely what we were discussing.  So amazing to see it in person! 

I've been doing some sampling for a blanket.  The weave structure is M's and W's and is from Carol Strickler's Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns.  The cool thing about these samples is that by turning the tie-up, I was able to change where the floats appeared.  In the sample on the right, the floats are in the colorful stripes.  In the middle sample, the floats are in the cream stripes.  On the left, the floats alternate in a checker board pattern from colorful to cream and back.  Unfortunately, I think that the floats are too long and need to go back to the sample warp and try again.  (On the one hand, I'm disappointed.  On the other hand, I'm grateful that I'm learning this now, and not after I put on two blankets worth of warp!)

  

The pencil is under one of the floats.

And, lastly, here is a transparency sampler that I just finished.  The background warp and weft are 40/2 linen set at 30 epi.  The pattern weft is 8/2 cotton.  I used a cartoon under the warp to help me make the pattern shapes. --Check out all the snow visible through the window.  Spring has arrived since I took this photo and that is all gone and instead, I have crocuses blooming in my sunny front yard!  Hooray!  Hooray! Hooray!

Placemats

A friend of mine has finally moved into her new home after months of living in the "little house" at her mother-in-law's property.  These placemats are a housewarming gift for the new place.

The warp is 10/2 cotton with  chenille accent stripes (probably a rayon chenille) threaded as crackle.  My original plan was to use two colors of cotton chenille as warp with a 10/2 colored cotton as tabby.  Like all plans, this one had flaws.  The worst issue was that the polychrome (many-color) samples looked just awful!  I didn't care for them at all!  I shifted to a single color pattern (a grey-brown chenille) and a green 10/2 cotton for the tabby weft and was able to weave the mats.  

I made six placemats.  Four mats have "horizontal ladders" and two have something of a "goose-eye" pattern.  They are thick and rest well on the table (and they match my plates nicely...maybe I need to make another set! :).

PVC Weaving Tool and Plain Weave Stripes

I had a student at the studio this week.  She is a new weaver and ran into some trouble warping her rigid heddle loom with a pre-wound warp chain.  I wanted her to see how a warp chain was made on a warping board, but I use a warping reel.  This pvc warping "board" was put together from pieces of my pvc niddy noddy/yarn skeiner.   It's one yard long.  Aside from the straight pipe, it uses some T's and one X connector.  PVC is flexible enough that I'm not confident using is as a real warping board, but it worked great to show how a cross is made and how weavers tend to tie the cross in a warp.

The next pretty little piece is on my 8", 4-harness Structo loom.  It's plain weave with a cotton warp of stripes from commercial 8/2 and handspun yarns.  I planned this warp and had to re-do my calculations about three times.  The first issue was one of sett.  My handspun cotton was 18 WPI.  I usually sett plain weave at 1/2 the WPI.  Sara Lamb in her book Spin to Weave describes using a closer sett with a weft that is finer than the warp.  She says that this helps create good drape in a plain weave fabric.  I decided to try it, and recalculated the warp stripes at a closer sett (I ended up using 20 epi, threaded 1-1-2 in a 15-dent reed.)  The next re-calculation was due to concerns with the accent stripes at the edges of the plain weave stripes.  

Theoretically, when plain weave is being woven, a warp thread becomes a dashed line as the weft covers it every other pick.  I didn't want one side of my stripes to have a dash-dot-dash pattern and the other side to have a dot-dash-dot pattern!  I hate to tell you how much I worried about this!  Finally I realized that if my blue stripes were all odd numbers of threads, the purple accent warps would be on the same shed and would always lift together.  Whew!  There was one more related recalculation when I realized that I needed to have the white background in odd numbers of threads as well, otherwise one group would have a pair of dash-dot-dash accents and the next stripe would have a pair of dot-dash-dot accents.  Woo boy!  Well and good, I finally got it all worked out and am happily weaving at the loom.

Guess what I discovered today?!  I made an error winding the warp.  There is one group of white background threads that is an EVEN number of threads.  But check out the woven fabric: it doesn't make a difference in the way the stripes look!  I guess I got all worked up about nothing.  I wonder if it would make a difference in a different piece....maybe if the weft were thicker??

A Little Bit of Lots of Stuff

The above photo is of a baby blanket woven for some friends.  The warp is a burgundy color, the pattern weft is a light pink (both in 10/2 cotton) and the tabby weft is a wool/angora/nylon yarn that I recycled from a sweater dress and is dark purple.  I love the hand of the blanket!  The recycled yarn softens the hand of the crackle weave significantly!

Check out these little samples:

 They are about an inch and a half tall by one inch wide.  I'm doing a custom piece for an individual and we needed to determine color order for the stripes.  I had wound a larger piece before I realized that maybe the colors should be in a different order and started winding the tiny tests.  Well, after the fifth tiny test I had found a combo that I liked and paused for a moment to run some calculations.  With five colors the number of color combinations are 5! (five-factorial), which equals 120 possibilities!  Half of them are reflections of each other--ABCDE is the same as EDCBA, which brings the number down to 60 possibilities.  Gasp!  Still to many to manage!  My fiber enabler came to the rescue and did some programing so that I could see all sixty color combinations.  Whew!  What a challenge!

Here's another little project on my first structo loom:

 It's a plaid fabric for Conner Prairie.  They are working on recreating a piece and this is one of many plaids that will become a part of the finished project.
This is how it looked going on the loom:

And, just because I'm excited about it, check out the new little structo that has come to stay at my house!  This is not the one being used to weave the plaid, it's another one.  :)  I keep hoping that one day I will find a way to teach weaving, so I am starting a collection of these little looms. 

AVL Test Warp #2 "Open Work Weave"

 I am slowly working on a second test warp with my new-to-me AVL 16 shaft production dobby loom.  The piece is from a work by Mary Meigs Atwater entitled "An Open-Work Weave" and is a huck lace variant.

It seems like there is a huge list of things I am learning with this warp.  Thing #1 is that the cloth storage beam system works.  Instead of having yards of cloth build up on the front apron beam, the cloth feeds through multiple rollers to a storage beam at the back of the loom.  The big trick for me is to remember to unlock the counter weight for the system.

Mechanical Dobby head with pattern bars.

Thing #2.  Mindlessly treadling through the set of dobby bars is, well, wonderfully mindless.  It was so easy!  Unfortunately, I don't have enough bars to do the checkerboard pattern I really want (each pick needs a bar with pegs).  So, I've had to employ a trick I read from another weaver--weave two steps forward and three back.

The woven pattern is four repeats of pattern A followed by a few shots of plain weave, then four repeats of pattern B.  I had enough bars to peg pattern A, the plain weave, and pattern B.  I wove that.  It was my wonderfully mindless weaving.  To get the checkerboard design, I weave the six picks of pattern A, reverse the dobby mechanism and treadle through the bars (without throwing the shuttle) to get back to the start of pattern A.  Then I re-reverse the dobby mechanism (back to the original direction) and weave the six picks of pattern A again.  Rinse and repeat two more times.  It has not been easy weaving.  Hmm.  That's not right.   The weaving has been straight forward, it's keeping track of where I am that has been hard.  Throw into the mix the fact that I cannot see the pattern well--though I've learned to feel it like Braille--and it's been challenging!  The other night I was able to sit down and weave a full bobbin of weft.  It felt like a great accomplishment!  (And, yes, my children were in bed and the house was mostly quiet!)

 Thing #3.  Some things take care of themselves.  The yarn I am using for this project is not a favorite.  I chose it because I am (in theory) making fabric for a bag for my pvc niddy noddy and wanted something durable that could handle a bit of water in case I put things away wet.  It is a polyester or other synthetic yarn.  It's a single, and, it turns out, likes to catch on itself.

So, every time I advance the warp it pulls the harnesses/shafts in use forward.  I've been able to wait to advance the warp until the end of the pattern repeat sections.  That means that the first few picks that I weave are plain weave, which makes it easier to separate the warp threads and go on with the weaving.  I'm hoping that this is a yarn choice problem and not a more generic warp advancement issue.

Thing #4.  Five yards is a long warp for me! (How embarrassing!)  I feel like I've been weaving this piece forever!  I either need to weave more (hmm.  That might be a possibility now that we're done with construction!) or I need to use shorter warps.  I'm still learning the waste allowances for this loom, and since I was testing the cloth storage beam system, I probably couldn't have used a much shorter warp this time.  Next time, I'll know to either pick a structure that I can peg completely or use a shorter warp!

And, just because they make me laugh, here is thing #5:  blocks.  My legs are just too short to work comfortably with the treadle/bench height of this loom.  So, I added blocks to the treadles (like blocks on the peddles of a tricycle!).  These are just leftover pieces of construction 2x4's covered in shelf liner or rug underlayment (it's a wide open mesh covered with soft foam-like plastic), and attached to the treadles with plastic zip-ties.  They work great!

Happy Weaving!

Quick Weaving

It didn't take long for this project to get on and off the loom. It is a "thick and thin" four-harness weave structure. It was easy to put on and easy to weave...and it's done--wet finished, pressed, and awaiting final decisions on the bag it's going to become.

The thin yarn is a 10/2 cotton; the thick is a 4/2 cotton.















I ran into challenges with my "new" method of warping back to front. When I warp with one color of yarn, it is easy enough to put the lease sticks through the cross, thread a rod through the end of the warp cross, lash on to the back beam and wind the warp. Color changes every few threads is not easy on my warping reel, so I wound two warps--one thick, one thin--and then needed to combine them and get them on the back beam and then threaded without making a mess of the order of the threads.

I ended up using a set of lease sticks for each warp and then carefully picked up threads from each lease stick with my rod to get them lashed to the back beam. It was a little challenging getting the threads picked off the lease sticks and onto the rod, but it did work. Whew!







I found this pretty piece in the kids' dress up box this week. It is (was) a chenille poncho for my then three year old son made by my cousin, Ruthie. Over the years it has been worn as intended, worn as a costume accessory, and played with in countless ways. The yarns are beautiful. When I saw it languishing in the costume box, I couldn't handle it anymore. Such beautiful yarns need to be used!

So, I carefully frogged the knitted poncho and now have some chenille yarn to play with. What am I going to do with it? I'm not sure yet! I know that chenille is not good for warp, so I've got to go digging through my library for ideas on how to show case these yarns (there were two yarns knit together). Stay tuned for future developments!

(edited to add: I may be wrong about chenille in the warp. A quick search on Weavolution showed that it gets used as a warp lots...just keep the tension gentle on the warp and sett it for the core yarn, not the pile. Now to dream of how to use this chenille! :)

Handspun Scarves & Fab Four projects

After the "Fab Four" workshop with Robyn Spady I couldn't wait to try some of the 4-shaft weaves with my yarns. The first was this integrated plain weave with two acrylic yarns. They are very orange, but they were very cool to weave and the fabric is a fascinating blend of colors and textures. How would I use this? Well, probably in very small bits--how about a 2-3" diamond on the cover of a book?







This scarf is still damp in this photo and you just can't see it's fuzziness! The yellow base yarn is an acrylic/mohair blend. The orange and black accent yarn is a wool that was knit into a "blank", dyed, and unraveled. The weave structure of the accent stripe is "cannele" and it used only a tiny bit of yarn!










These are two handspun scarves. The warp is a single sized with gelatin. The pink weft is a two-ply yarn that has been waiting very patiently for a project. The purple scarf has a mystery weft. It's a mystery because I didn't write it down. The warp alternates between a light purple/pink and a dark purple/pink yarn. I was hoping for a color-and-weave (shadow weave) effect. Unfortunately the yarns were too similar and my warping technique too irregular to keep everything straight. I gave up my plans for color-and-weave and just wove some twills.

Train of thought / 2010 Goal

The train of thought in creating cloth is pretty amazing sometimes! This piece of striped fabric started it's mental journey as a One Skein, knit Tank Top. The basic idea is to knit two identical pieces and seam them together with the seams in center front and center back. One side is seamed with the knit side showing; the other with the purl side showing. Cool idea by Leigh Radford!

The first change in the mental road was the realization that I weave faster than I knit and I'd like to work on making handwoven clothing this year (I'm still 3/4 of the way done making a muslin of the vest that I eventually want to have in handwoven fabric). Ah-ha! Two or three pages of calculations later, I had an idea of what I would need in terms of finished fabric, and I headed off to Handwoven.net to search their archives for interesting weave structures. I found one or two (or eight or ten!) patterns I liked and the rest, they say, is history.

Except, that history has a way of being written and re-written even as it is happening. What I thought would be an ideal warp yarn turned out to be chock full of knots and thin (moth eaten?) spots. This yarn came from my grandmother, so I think the damage was inherent in the yarn before I received it (I hope!)....there were too many thin spots deep inside the cones of yarn for me to think it was recent damage. At any rate, I had to pause winding the warp, take the yarn to the ball winder and wind it into usable balls. Deep breaths help at moments like this!

My calculations showed that I might be able to squeak the entire piece out with my one ball of colorful weft, but reality sunk in after 4 or 5 inches of weaving...I was packing the weft in one thread tighter than my calculations. There was no way I would be able to finish the piece. I tested my two weft yarn patterning (pictured...it's one shot of colored weft and one of the tan warp yarn as weft), and un-wove it all. Gulp.

It was a good thing I un-wove...I discovered that my stretchy weft yarn was pulling my selvages in significantly! Funny how I couldn't see it as I wove, but un-weaving it was really obvious! Once back to weaving I made sure to let the stretchy yarn relax or bounce back before I packed it in.

What a long story for a single photo! It will be fun to see what clothing I can create this year. I have high hopes of doing a stellar job of beginning! (Which translates to lots of beginning stuff that may or may not be very useful! :)

Best wishes for 2010!
Jessica/aka.Fibertwist

Sampling

Two bits of information landed in my brain at just the right time this week. First a WeaveZine interview with Sharon Alderman, where Sharon mentioned her method of sampling with different setts. Second, a post on Fibers of Being called "Silk Chenille Sampler" which also made use of various setts in the same sample warp.

I am getting ready to do some weaving with my "yard sale yarns". This particular yarn is a 16/2 cotton/poly (50/50) blend and it is finer than my typical 10/2 cotton warps.


I needed to sample, but I was not looking forward to putting on multiple scarf type warps to play with appropriate setts, etc.

The answer, from the above mentioned sources, is do use multiple setts in the same warp! Go figure!

Based on an estimated sett from the measured wraps per inch divide by two, I chose a sett looser than the estimate, one at about the estimate, one at the estimate plus 1/4 and one at the estimate plus ~1/3.









I'm weaving tabby--one for each sett--and twill. The sections are threaded for both straight twill and point twill. Hooray! I'm learning lots and will have an amazing sampler to keep when I'm done! Thanks, weavers, for sharing your techniques!

Play after Work

I've just finished weaving two towels on a honeycomb warp. The first one I wove was actually a monk's belt pattern on the honeycomb threading. I used the dark green warp as a the background weft and cream perle cotton (5/2) as the pattern weft. It looks classy! The second towel was woven with the honeycomb pattern. Dark green weft for background and a slubby, cream yarn as the outline weft.

And now, with the two "real" towels done, it's time to play!






Many moons ago I overdyed a light blue cotton yarn with yellow. In many ways the result was a sickly color--not a true yellow, not a strong green...but look at it with the dark green warp! Isn't that great!










Now I'm trying to find a good outline yarn (and yarn color) to make one more towel with honeycomb and the sickly green yarn as background weft.

I'm leaning towards the brown/tan chenile. I may need to walk away for a while and see how I like the colors later!

Weaving Woes

Check it out! I've been having some challenges with my weaving. Do you see the position of the bar that holds my back-beam? It is set at a notch other than the very end. I have never intentionally done that until now! It turns out (thank you very much, Joanne Hall for your tips on improving Jack loom sheds!) that one way to get a better shed with inelastic fibers--rayon in this case--is to raise the back beam.

I discovered I had a problem with this warp (6-ply rayon, 20 epi) when every other pass with the weft was catching warp threads that were supposed to be down! Then I realized that the warp threads were rising (1/4" or so) off the shuttle track of the beater/reed when I depressed treadles.
Things are working much better now with the back beam closer and higher. I can't weave much--I have to advance every 1.5-2", but it works and looks great! There is a subtle check pattern (twill+broken twill) if you look closely at the photo.














Weaving Woe #2.

If you have two looms then you can have two woes, right? This one is a case of too much draw in for the poor selvage threads to handle. They are just getting scraped more than they can bear. I'm at the point where I am just going to weave as much as I can (I've stopped repairing the broken threads!) and cut it off the loom. It is supposed to be a shawl for a friend....but I'm not giving it to anybody until I take a good look at the edges....it might have to end up in the "fabric stash" and not in the good enough for a gift stack.

Toys

I made two animals from a pattern in "Twill Thrills" (Blue Tick Hound, p.8).

The blue one was a test with commercial fabric to see how the pattern went together. Unfortunately, I cut the body too big and my "hound" turned into a "rabbit".

The pink ticking fabric went on the loom Monday morning and came off Tuesday evening. It was a narrow warp (10") and short (3 yards), but it provided enough fabric to make the toy and a burp cloth and have plenty of fabric left over. The warp and weft are 10/2 cotton, unmercerized, sett at 24 epi.

Overshot -Pleased as Punch!

Look at this bit of overshot! I am pleased as punch at how it is turning out!

The weave structure is Marguerite Porter Davison's 'A Handweaver's Pattern Book', pg 148 titled "Valley Forge Dogwood".

The warp and tabby weft are a two ply acrylic --about 25 wpi. The pattern weft is reclaimed yarn from a skirt & sweater set. It's mostly acrylic with a bit of metallic sparkle and some mohair.

More importantly, the warp/tabbyweft and pattern weft work beautifully together! I have been able to sit and weave without tweaking, without struggling to get the right number of picks per inch...it just works!

I am so pleased!

Cheese-y Smiles!

I'm thrilled with this project! I wove two rayon scarves on a small Structo loom and I love how they turned out!

The yarns are a mix of stash yarns--a burgandy 6-ply rayon from WEBS, a tan 2-ply rayon, and a multi-colored rayon single. The structure is a M's & O's variant from "A Handweaver's Pattern Book" by Davison called "Forest Crook's Blanket Weave.

The little Structo loom (on loan from a friend in my weaving guild) had a miniature/toy-like feel. Maximum weaving width is 8 inches! But, the loom works great. I will be using it later on this year for a double weave demo for the Wabash Weavers Guild.


Two intersting points--I wove two scarves with two slightly different treadlings (is it ok to call it that even though it's a table loom? Should it be "lever-ings"?) The first one was ho-hum. It was just a scarf. The second one, more of a 2/2 twill, was stunning to me. Once off the loom and wet finished, the differences between them seem more subtile, but I'm still partial to the 2/2 twill weave structure.

Point number two: check out my drying rack. This is a wonderful, inexpensive, three arm rotating drying rack from a local store. It works great! However, it leaves a lovely crease in my scarves when I hang them to dry. The solution? Increase the diameter of the arm with an old, plastic cone. No more creases!

Happy 2009! May your year be full of moments of joy and peace!

Three Scarves

Thanksgiving brought four of my nieces and their parents to our home. I thought it would be fun to let each of the girls design their own scarf.

The preparation: wind a 10 yd. warp of white acrylic. Sett= 12 epi. Threading: straight twill on four harnesses.

Scarf #1. The four year old (almost five) chose three colors for her scarf. Pink, purple, and brown. I said ok. After all, she is five (almost!) and has her own ideas of fashion and color...and you never know what you might learn from a five year old's color choices! Most of the scarf was woven in blocks of single colors, but there were two or three places where I combined the brown with the other colors for an interesting effect. --I had the treadles tied up for a 2/2 twill and tabby.

Scarf #2. The thirteen year old chose a cream colored novelty yarn (thick and bumpy) and a fine tan. I used one of the twill treadles for the cream, followed by a tabby shot of the tan. It worked very well and the overall effect showed more cream than the picture does.

Scarf #3. The eight year old wanted blue, but I was short on blue and asked if we could supplement it with white. Approval was granted, and I ended up weaving a straight 2/2 twill with 3 shots of white and 1 shot of blue.

Scarf #4. Scarf #4 didn't get woven over the holiday. I didn't start soon enough and didn't have enough time. However, I had previously woven a child's scarf out of handspun and it had a matching tam. (Hat & Scarf) It's just been sitting in my finished pile. So, out came the scarf and tam, and the two year old was as happy as a clam!

And so was I!

Stadium Blanket

Here are some photos of the blanket in progress. The Huck Lace is showing nicely!






















All four samples from this projects were sitting together tonight. I couldn't pass by the photo opportunity. Sampling is good. Sampling is my friend. ...I will probably sample again. :)

Samplers

I have been busy sampling. The goal is a stadium blanket for my sister-in-law. So far, I have woven three samples on my 4H loom, and I think there is a fourth one yet to be made!

It turns out that my nephew's school colors are blue and grey (he is playing football, which leads to my sister-in-law being in the stadium watching him and needing a blanket!). I happen to have multiple skeins of blue and some skeins of grey worsted weight knitting yarn in my stash. I'd like to use this yarn for the blanket...but I have never woven with knitting yarns like this before! So, I have been sampling.

Sampler #1
Warp:fingering weight knitting yarn.
Weft:worsted weight and fingering weight knitting yarns. Weave structures: 2/2 twill, plain weave, basket weave (two weft picks per shed).
Thoughts: (from the bottom of the photo to the top--more or less!) The 2/2 twill packed very loosely has a nice drape, but is loose enough that it will snag on jewlery, belt buckles, etc. Not good! The tightly packed 2/2 twills are really spongy and thick. It would make a really thick blanket. The plain weave with worsted weight weft has a nice hand to it, but doesn't look very special. The basket weave with worsted weight weft has both a nice hand and some visual interest.

Sampler #2
warp: worsted weight knitting yarns (two colors, wound together, threaded randomly)
weft: worsted weight & fingering weight knitting yarns
weave structures: plain weave, twill, point twill, broken twill, basket weave (two picks of fingering weft per shed).
thoughts: too many to list! The bottom line from this sampler was that I liked the hand of the plain weave fabric but I wanted something with more visual interest.












Sampler #3
warp: worsted weight knitting yarns.
weft: worsted weight knitting yarns
weave structures: huck lace (5-end and 3-end), plain weave.
thoughts: I like how the warp colors show in the Huck lace floats. The 3-end huck patter has smaller floats (less likely to get caught on something!). --Note: the blue and the grey are the yarns I plan to use.






Sampler #4 (yet to be made)
warp: blue and grey worsted weight knitting yarn
weft: same as warp
weave structure: 3-end Huck lace
The goal of this last sampler will be to determine the size of the Huck lace squares.
(The Huck lace idea comes from Handwoven Magazine, "Weaving as Chicken Soup" by Barbara Elkins, May/April 2008.)

Weaving is amazing! I've had fun making these samples and seeing how the yarns interact! Can I weave some more soon?

Warped

I love getting to this point in a project! The loom is warped, the stripes look awesome, and I'm ready to weave!

Wish me luck!

Dornik Twill Blanket

This work-in-progress is a Dornik twill blanket designed by Barbara Elkins of Webs.

It doesn't look like a blanket yet, does it?

I've had to overcome a number of challenges with this project. To start with I was unfamiliar with the term "Dornik twill". It wasn't hard to learn what it was, it just took some time--a short time to look it up, and a surprisingly long time to wrap my brain around the idea! ( It's a point twill with the point removed. ) Next, I had to add some threads to widen the piece. And then decide what colors I wanted for which stripes. Lastly, I had to check that a three yard warp was a good length for this blanket.

Whew! All these little steps. None of them were very difficult, but they each required physical and mental energy.

I look forward to getting this on (and off!) the loom!

Summer Winter Runner

Believe it or not, I got my summer/winter runner designed and woven!

I'm not sure how much I like the end product...right now it is hanging to dry, and I've already noticed one or two errors, not to mention design elements that are not as nice as I thought they might be. --This is called gaining experience, right?!

One special challenge from this piece has to do with my method of retying the warp to the loom after cutting off a piece. I like Peggy Osterkamp's method of weaving an inch of plainweave, inserting a stick into shed A, a stick into shed B, and another inch of plainweave. After the sticks have been woven into the piece, the finished portion of the weaving can be cut off the loom, and the weaving reattached to the front apron via the two sticks. You don't have to worry about tying lots of knots and getting the tension right again. It's simple, and it works.

Except this time, the warp started to pull out of the weaving and the sticks. I had one side of the piece with almost no tension at all and the other at normal weaving tension. Gulp. It took some time staring at the piece to figure out possible solutions! Interestingly, just as I was about to try one method, I realized I could try something new, and changed plans!

Syne Mitchell of Weave Cast mentioned lashing on with shoelaces in one of her episodes. I was able to tie the warp in 1" bundles with an overhand knot and lash these knots to the front apron bar, and viola! I was back in business! Hooray for Syne, and for all my other on-line weaving connections! You guys saved the day!