I've reached Acceptance ... but it took a while.

Anyone remember my weaving project? The quick & easy dishtowels that I started, oh, around the middle of February?

Probably not. The last time I mentioned them was in mid-March, when the warp was completely screwed up and I was begging for help on the weaving email list. It was completely impossible to wind the warp on -- I had wound the warp holding two threads together but WITHOUT a finger in between to keep them from tangling.

Won't do that again.

So I rethreaded the whole thing to put two threads into one heddle, to make a sort of fake basket weave. I think this would have worked out just fine if I had cut off the yard or so that Dean and I had forced onto the loom with the old threading. But instead I had wound that back off the beam before rethreading .... which meant that I had to guess which two threads when with each other.

There are two groups of two threads in each slot of the reed. If you think of the ways that they could be mixed up or tangled -- that is, if I had thought about it -- you'd realize that this might not work out so well. And, indeed, that first yard or so wound on quite easily, until I reached the fresh warp where All Tangles Were Revealed.

Oh, my.

After giving it some thought, I decided to cut threads as necessary to sort it out all at once.


Lovely, isn't it? By my calculations every fourth group should have been just fine but I had to cut and retie at least one thread in each group of four (usually two) in all but about a dozen cases.

Here's a close up:


Despite the fact that the threads are all different lenghts now, I did manage to wind quite a bit of warp on until the remaining tangles and the tedium of combing, combing, combing got me down. When coupled with the paper problems I was having on the warp beam (if I warp the full width of the loom it's just a titch wider than an unfolded grocery bag....) and I just stopped for a while.

Turns out it took about two months for the remaining warp to mutate from That Headache I Need To Deal With Because I Spent Forever Winding the Warp to this:


Whack! Problem removed.

When I measured it I was quite pleased and surprised to discover that I had wound about 5 yards onto the loom, so we ought to get three or four towels out of this after all.


After the kids went to bed last night I wove a header and fooled around with the tie-up to see what I could do. (The enormous fringe is part of the tangled warp; normally I'd be anxious to wind on every last inch.)

Toby is making sure that the kitchen chair smells like him even though it is about six feet from its accustomed spot.....

The kids are still asleep. But I can't wait until we can start weaving!!!