Yardage Stats

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Because some of you asked…

Warp Length:

• Wound on 10 yards
• Wove 9 yds according to my on loom measurements while under tension + 1 yd of color sample
• Off loom measurement: 8 yds of fabric; about 7 yards usable

Width:

• 30″ wide at the reed
• 28″ wide at the fell
• 28″ off the loom

More Stats:

• 30 ends per inch
• 900 ends + 4 floating selvedge ends
• approximately 40 picks per inch
• 18 total failed handspun; 4 while threading the loom; and the rest during weaving
• no broken warp otherwise

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Either Zephyr is really, really stretchy or I measured incorrectly on the loom. I believe its the latter. And the 7 yards usable? Well, I had some treadling mistakes that I didn’t catch. Because I was weaving with the wrong side up, I couldn’t see them. I knew the first 20″ or so were riddled with mistakes, but there were a few scattered through out. I suspect those were at the end of a long weaving session.

The handspun fails were due to bad joins at the color change. I didn’t feather the 2 ends enough when I changed colors and they separated right at the joins. Or, the joins were too fat and the abrasion of the reed scraped them apart. Again, a better feathering job may have prevented them.

How did I fix them? The ones that failed while warping, I just replaced with black Zephyr. I just didn’t want to deal with an unplied yarn dangling off the back of the loom. Chances were good that they would unspin and drift apart. For the ones that failed during weaving, I put in a rescue warp with Zephry about 3x the length of the failed join area. Wove on the rescue warp for a length before re-joining the original handspun back into the warp.

It’s amazingly difficult to take pictures of a black fabric at night, but you can see in the above pictures that I mostly achieved the look I set up to make. The color runs are longer than I liked, but I like the effect. It looks like wet paint dripping down the length of a black ground. Jackson Pollock it’s not.

And just for fun and for my sanity sake, I played a bit for the last yard. I used some of the leftover Zephyr I had from sampling, and found the colors that most closely matched the colors I had dyed and spun into my yarn to see what it would look like with alternate weft colors.

Back of Sampler (click for larger)

Kind of fun, isn’t it? The back is a weft faced fabric. I had thought that it might be fun to weave a self lined fabric with COLOR, instead of a lining. The far right is the indigo that I used for my fabric. Next to it is the same black as the warp. The remaining were colors that were found in my hand dyed / hand spun yarn.

Front of Sampler (click for larger)

Unfortunately, the idea was prettier in my head than in reality. The color bled through to the front too much and had a much stronger impact than I thought it would. Still, it has potential. I just need to figure out what that is.