April 2017 – Rock Lake Weaving

Here is a little bit of weaving trivia for you; when does one plus one equal one?

The answer, while seemingly simple, can actually be a bit convoluted. One plus one, equals one, when you are talking about warps, and tying a new warp onto an old one.

There are many reasons to do this, and really, if we are being truthful, just as many not to.

I have chosen both ways, many times.

Right now, I am choosing to tie onto the old warp. The biggest reason I chose this is because the two warps will be woven with the same threading. If they were to be different threadings, there would be no point in tying on.

Now when I put the “old” warp on, I carefully threaded it, checking along the way for mistakes. Then I sleyed the reed, checking again for threading mistakes. Once that was done, and I had even tension on the warp, I wove a few repeats of the pattern, using a weft that contrasted highly with the colours of the warp. This allowed me to…..you guessed it, check for threading errors (along with sleying errors, and any other random errors that I might have made).

Once I carefully inspected the weaving, and was satisfied that I had found and fixed any errors (I will admit that there are inevitably a few, but I reserve the right to save my ego, and not give an exact number 😛 ), I switched wefts, and settled right into my weaving rhythm.

Now, the process of threading, checking, sleying, checking, tensioning, checking, weaving, and checking AGAIN, all takes time. approximately 4-6 hours, depending on how complex the threading is, and how many mistakes I find and fix.

The process of tying on is relatively simple. you reach the end point of a warp, and you cut it off. You need to decide if you want to tie on to the old warp at the front of the loom or at the back (We can talk about why you would chose one of the other another time).

So you cut off the old warp, and prepare the new one. Then you simply grab a thread of each warp, tie them together, and you are off to the races.

Sort of.

Because you see dear friend, nothing is REALLY that simple. tying on can be an interesting exercise in keeping the threads of not only one, but TWO warps in the correct order. Sometimes the order matters very much, other times not so much. It is up to the weaver to decide the appropriate level of attention that should be directed to the thread orders.

Then you need to consider your knots. Overhand? surgeon’s? weavers knot? Many people choose the weavers knot for this purpose. It is a strong knot that is relatively quick to tie, strong, and best of all, it doesn’t need long tails sticking out to keep it’s strength. (You should google you tube videos of these knots, but only if you have a ridiculous amount of time, because it is a bit of a wormhole). Tails are important, they can effectively attach a thread to the one (or more) next to it, and cause all kinds of headaches)

So you choose your knot (we’ll go with a weaver’s knot, because that is my favourite). Then you tie one. Then another, and another, and another. In the case of the warp that I am currently working on, there will be 720 knots tied by the time I am done with them.

Once the knots are tied, you look at the giant mess of seemingly hopelessly tangled yarns, take a deep breathe, cross your fingers, eyes, toes, and anything else that is available for crossing, and (we’ll skip a step or two here, because it depends on the warping method you chose wayyyyyyy back there ^^^^^) put tension on the two warps that are now, hopefully, united into a single warp of interesting composition.

So after all of that, you might wonder what the benefit of tying on is. In this case, I KNOW that my current warp is threaded and sleyed without error. So, roughly 5 hours of knot tying seems to be a good replacement for roughly 5 hours of threading and sleying. however, I know that I will not have to spend time finding those sneaky little errors that tend to creep into warps while threading and sleying, particularly in houses with children who regularly interrupt their household weaver.

So the combination of an error free “old” warp, a new, solid coloured warp where a correct thread order doesn’t have to be particularly adhered to, and my unreasonable tendancy to practice known skills (like tying weaver’s knots) a silly amount of times, I am tying my new warp onto the old.

Here is my tangled mess (that is only a small portion of the whole width, I have about two more hours of tying to go), I’ll let you know soon how it turns out.