Things Going Wrong

I have had a crazy stressful week. I had two assignments due, one of which was epic and impossible, I had to move out of the house I was housesitting (and clean it all up to hide the fact that I'm a slob and didn't sweep or vacuum for the whole three months I was there), and I wanted to get my loom warped. I had a very tight schedule to get all these things done, which was completely blown out because I suddenly had no access to vital learning materials because my university's IT department sucks and keeps breaking things. So there was a bit of tears and hysterics this week. But I managed to get it all done!

I started warping my loom last Saturday. This is the first time I've had to deal with proper big skeins that aren't just DMC thread, so that was interesting. I'd been warned about skeins, so I was very careful.

I ended up putting it around my basket, which worked qute well for me. I just plopped the purple one on top of the green when I got up to it, and they didn't argue at all, which was nice. I'd arbitrarily decided before I started warping that I wanted my stripes to go green-purple-green-purple-green down the band. Then after I'd started with the green I started pondering whether purple-green-purple-green-purple would look better. It took me all week and lots of staring at the half-warped loom to finally decide on purple-green-purple-green-purple. So that meant shuffling the cards a little bit, but that was fine.

Yesterday after I'd handed my assignments in I started thinking about weaving. First I needed to decide what patterns I was going to brocade, so I went back to looking at my leaf. I ended up printing off an outline of it and tracing it onto the graph paper.

I've been home since Tuesday night, but I didn't remember to charge my camera battery until I wanted to take this photo. So we've still got phone pictures. Anyway, this leaf looks a whole lot better than my last attempt! I even put in the little veiny bits with the idea that they could work as tie-downs for the brocade weft. I also did my little arrow thingy, I had a vague idea that I'd have a small arrow thingy in the middle of the band, then a big leaf, then another small arrow thingy, then my words, then an arrow thingy, then the leaf, then the arrow thingy. I decided to give up on the cool looking swirly motif thing, since I didn't know what to put inside it.

Then I started weaving!

I'm quite pleased that I chose purple-green-purple-green-purple. I think it needed the darker colour on the edges. Anyway, here's where I realised that my little arrow thingy was only gonna cover the purple stripe in the middle and only a tiny bit of the green on either side. The band is only an inch wide, so it would've just gotten lost. I decided I'd just do a leaf on either side of my words.

Here's where my problems started. I added in the brocade weft and started my leaf pattern, but each thread was miles away from the next one. I decided almost straight away that it was gonna look crap, so I unpicked it and rewound my gold thread to double it over in an effort to make it cover more of the surface. It took me ages to figure out if I had enough gold thread. I decided to put everything closer together, and only do one leaf at the start instead of on either side of the words. Then I had to go to work, so I didn't get to see if it worked.

It didn't work. This morning I wove half of my leaf and it just looked awful.

This picture was actually taken with my camera, since my battery is all charged now. The purpose of my graph paper is to see what the pattern will look like when it's stretched a bit. The actual weaving stretched it double again. Also, if I put the weft over only one card, it gets swallowed up, but if I put it under one card, the warp looks really thick. Anyway, this is half of my leaf. Does is look like a leaf to you? Nope. The brocade threads are way too far apart. I think the problem is that my picks are too big. I get about four picks per centimetre of weaving, but Guntram with a 30/2 warp (just a little bit finer than my cord) and the same gold thread gets at least ten picks per centimetre. That's more than double what I'm doing. If I could half the size of my picks I'd be happy, because it would be like there was a thread in every one of those gaps in the picture above. The problem is I have no idea how to do it. I've been beating as had as I can, the whole loom creaks under the pressure.

Anyway, I'm a little upset because I was intending to get a lot of this done today, and unless I fix it right now I won't be sending it to November Crown to enter in the Kingdom A&S competition in two weeks. I've also spent a lot of money on good silk and gold thread, and I would hate to have to chuck it all. There's no way I'm going to keep going with how it looks now. I thought the tower brocading I did at the start of the year was gappy, but looking at it now it's really not. You can't fit a whole thread between the brocade threads that are there, and you can with space to spare on the one I'm doing now. It's odd because I used thicker threads for the whole tower belt, and the whole thing is done in the same size thread, and I still get four picks per centimetre. I would've thought that finer thread would mean finer weaving, but instead each pick is the same distance apart, but it looks further because the threads are finer.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make smaller picks, I'd be grateful for the advice. I don't know if maybe the tension on the warp makes any difference, or if I need to find something with a smaller edge than my old school ruler to beat each pick. Or if I just need completely different materials.