Issues

I'm having issues. Issues with tension. My fingers have been rubbed raw from pulling 200 individual threads tight, tying them off, then discovering that THEY'RE NOT ALL TIGHT. It's very frustrating. I end up with little bubbles on the surface of the band, above and below. Now, you'd think that by beating the weft and creating these bubbles I would be tensioning the remainder of the warp by pushing the slack into the bubbles, but apparently it doesn't work that way. There's just more bubbles. So I pull the threads tighter from the teeth end and tie them off again, only for bubbles to appear somewhere else.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to try a simple twist pattern. I threaded the two edge cards on either side in one direction, then I divided the middle cards into seven groups of alternating S and Z. The edge cards turn continuously forward, but the middle cards turn four forward, four backward. After unweaving and retensioning and weaving again, I ended up with this:

It just looks like messy weaving with threads all over the place. There's still random bubbly bits, but this is the smoothest I could get it. I don't want a random messy looking band, I want something neat, so I decided to unweave it and change the threading. I left the edge cards as they are, and divided the middle cards into three groups of alternating S and Z. The band is only two centimetres wide, so maybe my seven groups were getting lost in each other.

Can you tell the difference? Other than it looking a bit bubblier and messier, it looks the same. Ugh.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. I'm going to bed.