Well, if you look at this picture
it looks like I really haven’t done anything on the weaving front. But, that is not the case. After mending the broken warp thread and giving the warp a nice, deep conditioning, there was just no getting around it: my main problem was that the spacing of the reed was too small, so this happened.
I cut off what I was weaving and changed to a reed with a larger size dent. And see all that fuzz in the reed. Yeah. That is a problem. It was collecting at the bottom of the reed and was mostly caused by the beating of the weft thread in place.
BTW, for those of you that aren’t weavers, a reed is used to space the warp threads evenly across the width of the project, as well as used (as part of the loom beater) to put the weft thread (the thread that runs across the warp) in place. It is called a reed, because originally, that is what they were made of, reeds. In fact, you may see some old looms with reeds that are actually made of reeds.
A dent is the spacing between the “teeth” of a reed (if you think of a reed as kind of like a comb.) A 12 dent reed means that there are 12 spaces per inch along the reed. A 6 dent reed means that there are 6 spaces per inch along the reed. (At least, this is true in the US.) Please note that just because a dent is there, doesn’t meant that you have to fill it with a warp thread, or can only fill it with one warp thread. How many warp threads go in a dent is dependent on the type of cloth that you plan to weave.
For this project, in going from a 12 dent reed to a 6 dent reed, I went from only threading 5 dents out of every 6 with a warp thread, leaving 1 empty (like this 1-1-1-1-1-0-1-1-1-1-1-0), to filling 2 out of every 3 dents with two warp threads and 1 out of every 3 with one warp thread (like this 2-2-1-2-2-1.)
Confused? If so, let me know, and I will try to explain it better in another post when I try to give a primer on weaving.
In any case, the warp in the reed now looks like this:
and the warp threads are not being abraided so much.
On the sock front, the diamond brocade sock is moving along, slowly but surely;
and one of the Jitterbug Parrot socks is done.
That is all for now!
I enjoyed reading about your weaving, sorry to hear about the bit you had to cut off, it looks great so far. I love your socks! I thought diamond brocade would be a quicker knit, I am learning a lot about mosaic knitting from you.
I commented on Ravelry but I’ll say the same thing here – that weaving looks gorgeous! I did see you last night at the knit group but it was after I already sat down. Once I find a “safe” place to sit it’s harder for me to get up and mingle. I’m such a dork…
I just adore that Jitterbug Parrot sock. The blue is so vibrant. Gorgeous!
I don’t think it ever clicked that the reed is part of the beater, though as soon as I read it I thought, “Oh, duh” — thank you! Pretty soon I’ll be an expert. 🙂 And your handspun is still sooo beautiful!
The scarf is going to be fabulous! Did you cut it in front of the reed and then re-attach it to the front beam? I’ve only warped my loom once, back to front, but I know some (most?) do it the other way…