Saturday, February 25, 2012

Weaving! LIMP threads :(

Much has happened these past couple of months.  I lucked into a used Baby Wolf just over an hour away from my home and got it at a good price.

After many posts to some weaving "groups" I am on, a wonderful woman in the town south of me came up on a Saturday and spent almost 2 hours with me getting my narrow warp on the loom.

Then began the posts to my weaving group about the different things I was having problems with etc.

I had elected to weave a 7" wide warp of 8/2 un-merc cotton using a four shaft twill sampler that offers up 62 treadlings from Handwoven magazine Sept/Oct 1995 pgs 58-60.

The only thing that persists as an issue is having limp threads in some of the sheds.

The sampler calls for a few shots of basket weave between each new tie up to aid with the selvedge changes  (I'm close on that wording) which is not uncommon from various reading of articles and posts on various weaving groups I belong to on Yahoo!

I tried:
->making sure all of the tie up cords (these are the cute ones with the little brown Schacht logo buttons on them) were the the same length.  YES
->making sure that all of the tie up cords in each treadle were of the same consistency of tension - YES
->using a different treadle
->not having my basketweave treadles on two spare treadles at the same time as the 4 treadles being used for the sampler pattern at that time.  In other words, I was being lazy -or terribly clever, depending on how you look at it- and did not have to re-do the treadle tie ups for the basket weave each time i changed sampler pattern tie ups, before moving on to the next one.  - MADE no difference
->clearing the shed by treadling each one, clearing the shed, treadling the next one clearing the shed without any weaving picks.
->clearing the shed before each pick - still limp threads for next repeat of pattern- and TEDIOUSly slow


So this morning when the problem presented itself to me again in my more than 10 minutes of weaving, I crawled around more under the loom.  I tied up the next pattern
1-3, 1-2, 2-4, 3-4
and dang if the last treadle (3-4) didn't give me limp threads on shaft three threads!

and look Basket Weave is (1-2, 3-4) and I get the limp threads on the 3-4!

so here are the pictures of the  1-3, 1-2, 2-4, 3-4 sheds showing clearly that 3-4 sucks for a combination on this loom no matter what I try.
NOTE: there is a floating selvedge on each end of the warp, which shows clearly.

Can you  help?

NOTE: blogger is giving me fits for logging in and creating a post.  sometimes it does and sometimes it does not.  This post is a link to a weaving yahoo group and please if you do not mind, answer either privately to me via the yahoo group or to the group but NOT in the comment section here.  Thank you.

1-3 UP

1-2 UP

2-4 UP

BLAH! 3-4 LIMP threads :(

extremely difficult to make any sense in the picture.  this is the 3-4 UP and shaft 4 is just very slightly (not even 1/8 of an inch) higher than shaft 3