Weaving Errors

Marcy Petrini

3/28/2016

The handout – monograph, really – for the Convergence™ seminar “Weaving Errors: How to Avoid them or Fix them” (S-FA067) is finally done – all 117 pages of it!

Are there really that many errors to make? Well, yes and in my nearly 40 years of weaving and over 30 in teaching, I either made them myself or one of my students did. I do wonder whether I covered them all in the monograph and I am counting on the Convergence™ participants in my seminar (33 to date) to let me know any that I missed.

I have talked about treadling errors in this blog before, but there are errors that can creep in at every step of the way: in winding the warp, dressing the loom, threading the heddles, sleying the reed, tying on, and treadling. There are strategies for minimizing errors and to avoid future issues. And some errors can be corrected more easily than others.

Poor tension on the warping board, for example, may come back to bite us when dressing the loom and we may have to make up for it when we tie on. Look at the discrepancy in length in the warp bouts in the picture below. All of that extra length adds up to loom waste.

Threading errors can sometimes be corrected, but sleying? We just have to re-sley, and hope that we don’t introduce a new error when fixing the old.

The most pernicious of sleying errors occurs when we skip a threaded warp end from the denting, as shown below:

The sleying will look just fine, and unless we check from the side of the loom as it was done in this picture, this error will appear as a threading error, since one of the threads won’t participate in the cloth – that will be after we start weaving, at which point everything will have to be undone…….

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