Or, Sometimes When You Ignore Common Sense, You Create Art; and Sometimes, You Create a Mess.
Sing I the praises of Meisterin Johanna von Sudeborn, generous hall-leader, who in time of cold and darkness did gift this humble poet of her homestead with wool yarn in bold colors. Such are her wisdom and insight that the wool was colored purple and green, the colors of my lord husband and his Eastern household. And so, to do honor to this gift and to my husband, I undertook to create for him some warm thing to wear.
I started with an attempt to nalbind a hat. (Okay, I started by winding the yarn into balls using a 1" dowel as a nostepinne.) I discovered that the yarn was rather curly and bouncy, and the nalbinding was frustrating.
Maybe, I thought, I could weave a scarf.
Why, you may ask yourself, did I think it was a good idea to take curly and bouncy yarn and try to weave with it? I have no good answer. I recognized that this was likely to be a liability, yet there I was, putting a green yarn warp onto my tapestry loom. 90 warp ends for a 10" wide scarf.
Maybe, I thought, I could do a twill.
So, with 'Honest Movie Trailers' playing in the background, I tied around 150 string heddles for a 4-shed plain 2/2 twill. (I had about 30 already tied.) And then I put those 180 heddles onto my 4 heddle bars and my 90 warp ends. And I wisely put the project down at that point (warping and heddles took about 5 hours), and went to bed.
The next day, I sat down and raised the first heddle bar.
...where's the shed? Did I do something... okay, take this, lift up, rest here... yeah, okay, I can see the shed on this side...
The 4 heddle bars occupy something like 6" of length on the loom. When the top one is lifted (and you have springy, lively warps), the shed is fairly well vanished by the time you try to get your shuttle through under the bottom one.
I tried to soldier on, thrusting my weaving sword approximately where the shed might have been, and tried to weave in a few waste rows, but... it became increasingly evident that this was Not Happening.
As I might have expected, given the nature of the yarn.
I have not yet written the project off! I have retired two of the heddles, leaving me with what I think is called a half basket weave - one weft goes over two, under two, over two, under two. With only two heddles, the top shed is much closer to where I can put the shuttle through. I wove some waste, and a few rows of purple yarn, and called it done for the day.
If all goes well, when I take it off the loom, it will... probably do something crazy and crinkly, and maybe I will learn to block a wool garment.
Adventure!
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