Tales of the Rug.

 I'm going to document most of the issues I had with The Rug. 

Inspector Zig 
looking for errors

The impetus for making The Rug was DH declaring we needed a rug of a specific size and material for by the den slider; it has to cover dirty feet coming in from the door, and also needs to go under the cat door and stepping stool to keep the stool from scratching the floor. The material should be of cotton so it can go in the washer, since this area needs regular cleaning. It also gets a lot of direct light, so fade proof would be great, and it has to absorb water from people and cat feet in the winter. It needed to pass my idea of what might look ok in the room. A quick survey of what's available in the market place yielded nothing. Good thing I'm a weaver!

I decided to make a rep rug from one of the books in the library; it has a mid century modern vibe and a sturdy construction. It's a type of weave that takes forever to warp but weaves up very fast. I ordered an 8/4 poly/cotton warp in dark blue and light blue that's supposed to be fade resistant, and loaded the draft into my weaving software.

1. The first issue was that this warp rep weave is so dense I had to order more heddles. Not a big deal, and they arrived quickly.
2. I wound 30? 40? ends too many, and I'm not sure why. I think I was going by EPI and inches as opposed to following the pattern... I took them off the warp chain before I started, so also not a big deal. They're chained up nicely awaiting reuse.
3. Then I threaded... and threaded... It's about 1200 threads. I took it slow to favor my back and also to avoid mistakes. Then I wound the warp on.
4. When that was done, I tied on and then doubted my tension... I unwound the warp and rebeamed it, retied it on and started weaving.
5. I could not get the reed easily through the threads!!! I checked everything I could think of... Asked for help. Verified the sett. Pouted. Tried again. Varied tension. Nothing worked. I decided I needed a less dense sett.
6. I arrived on 30 EPI (down from 36 EPI) because it would be 3 ends per in a 10 dent reed instead of 3 dents in a 12 dent reed... That would avoid uneven reed marks on the finished rug. I probably should have sampled to see how much denser I could have made it, but this is what I decided on. Simply resleying in the other reed would make the cloth wider than my loom could handle, so I decided to throw the extra ends off the back.
7. Oh if it were that easy! There are a lot of stripes in this warp, and I had to remove threads proportionally from each stripe. 
8. This took months, as I avoided the studio to avoid the "Dog on the Loom". Several folks recommended that I cut my losses, get rid of the warp and start something else but DARN IT I'm a weaver and I was going to make this rug.
9. I didn't finish the resleying before my vacation, so when I came back I had to figure out where I was. I signed up for a sewing class at the local community college to justify my procrastination.
10. Finally I got it to a near weavable state! and found a couple of threading errors. I fixed those and started weaving.
11. As I finished the hem, I noticed a spot that was less dense than others... Yep, I had one thread in that dent instead of 3. Luckily it was close to the edge, so it was easy to fix. Had it been in the middle, I would have fixed it anyways; I really want this rug to be right!
12. I think there were some crossed threads, too, which I fixed and forgot about.
13. The first 3 inch border is a bitch. It requires switching shafts and pickup to get a solid color right across. I thought this might look weird, and I wish I hadn't done it! Sadly it's too late.
14. Ahhh... then the real weaving started, and went quickly. I wove most of the 60 or so inches in a few days, then started on the last foot, which took about the same amount of time as the first 60"

    

    Finally weaving!!!

15. Yeah, and I realized I was likely going to run out of thick weft... I found the invoice from January and went to order some more, then realized my credit card had been hacked and I had no way to pay for it. DH came to the rescue and bought the yarn for me.

16. 

    I added even more weights
    later in the process

     Remember back where I threw a bunch of threads off the back? When I warp back to front, I loop the thread over the back apron rod... so when I near the end of the warp, the threads under tension that had mates that were not under tension started going limp. At the end of the weaving I'd deployed over 30 weights to weigh these down, and had started putting two threads per weight in some places. This slowed down progress considerably, as I found and fixed and found and fixed the threads.
    

    

    Not a lot of weft left!

17. Turns out I had enough yarn with just a few yards to spare! I'm sure that was only because I ordered some. So now I have a spool of blue mop cotton waiting for the next project.
    
18. That 3 inch border was a bad at the end as in the beginning, and doesn't look any better to me. I can't really fix it, so I will live with it, maybe put a sticky note in the book to consider it carefully. In the transitions between stripes there are often two threads in the same shed; I'm not sure if that's an artifact of doing odd things in rep or if it's an error on my part... No one walking on it will notice it, but a fellow weaver might.
19. And it's done except for borders, fixing a surprisingly few errors, and a good bath. Then a photo shoot. The loom is cleaned up and ready for the baby blankets that'll go on next.

The Rug usually has 2 cats on it...

I'll also post photos of the blocks DH constructed to keep my loom from walking across the room... It's only useful for those types of weaves that require a hard beat, like most rugs do. They are awesome!!!!