On Being a Grown Up Weaver

I have been weaving about 40 years but all that experience doesn't seem to stop me from making rookie mistakes from time to time.  There are various reasons why we fall in to an error. Sometimes it's because we just get careless with the planning.  Or we try to take a 'shortcut' or we are worried about the quantity of materials available and so cut corners. sometimes we use an erroneous piece of information and this skews the project plan.

 I have been weaving the second fabric of my multifabric project, and all was going well with the warp.  I had wound it and sleyed it leaving gaps in the reed for the coloured stripes.  The dyeing for the stripes went well.

You can see the gaps left in the reed and the pretty blues and rather bright yellow for the stripes.

The warping was finished and I started to weave. after half and inch I was thinking "This doesn't look right". Now at this stage I could have just closed my eyes to the problem and hoped that somehow it would miraculously "come right" as the weaving progressed. But, instead, I was a Grown Up weaver and I stopped weaving and thought about why it didn't look right.  It wasn't hard to work out that I was seeing too much weft in the coloured stripes, which meant that my sett was too open.  How could I have got my sett wrong?  Well, this is only the second time I have used this yarn.  The first time was when I used an elastine weft, and of course the slightly open sett wasn't noticeable because the elastine weft drew in the warp. Doh!

So I cut out the half inch of weaving and resleyed the warp with a closer sett.  And I have now woven my somewhat narrower fabric with the stripes that "look right.

 The weave is a 1/3, 3/1 twill and because I have woven it with the coloured stripes all as the warp faced block, the stripes have the amount of emphasis I was aiming for.  I'm just so pleased that I didn't weave on in hope!