I made a "cartoon" in a spreadsheet then tied white 8/2 tencel and dyed it in Procion "Bronze" fiber reactive dye. There's some black tencel in there as well. Weft is a 16/2 cotton fortuitously commercially dyed a close color, and it's woven in a straight twill reversing at the center.
My intention was to have triplets of white, descending, on each side of center with small chevrons in the border. the three white stripes just below center came out pretty much as I envisioned, the rest did not. Design wise, I like the center although the two groups of three should be offset slightly more; and I'd prefer that the upper triplet be as concise as the lower. The space on the outside of the triplets could be slightly narrower. For the border pieces, I would either set them further apart or leave them straight; either way, though, they need to be more concise, the mud that is on the top border is just sloppy work.
What went wrong:
- The tencel had some worn spots on it; I think there was abrasion on a part of the cone; but I decided to proceed anyways, predicting the worst that could happen was broken threads.
- I'm pleased with the color but I'd aimed at darker; I had a limited window to dye and my scale wouldn't power on; futzing with the scale compressed the amount of time I left my yarn in the dye. Either the quantity of dye or the timing resulting in a lighter color.
- As I dressed the loom, I slipped groups of yarn then knotted the back beam side of the warp. In a previous piece I'd attached those to the back apron rod with string, so on this piece I tried looping the bout over the apron rod and securing it with the knot. I don't think this was a good idea.
- As I wound on, I realized that my alignment wasn't what I wanted it to be. I was torn between redoing it or declaring it a class learning piece, and decided to move on, threading the heddles and reed.
- At this point, I wished I'd fixed it and debated rebeaming. I wasn't sure the delicate parts of the tencel could handle rebeaming, so I left it and started weaving.
- About three inches into weaving, I realized the tension was really wonky. I examined the loom and found the locking arm that holds the back beam out was not locked on one side. There were bad words, then I fixed it and tied on again. I debated rebeaming but again decided against it.
- About 12 inches into weaving the tension went to shit again. I debated tearing out the 12 inches and rebeaming it but threw some weights on the loose parts and kept weaving.
- The tension got worse and worse. At about 3' into the project I had a glass of wine and cut it off the loom.
- It's possible that the tension issues caused some of the misalignment, but I didn't analyze that.
What have I learned? All of my issues went back to the first item on this list, using material that I was concerned about. I should have rebeamed by step 6 and risked the broken threads. Not listening to my inner voice has been a problem in the past and it's a problem again.
