Tale of a threading error

There are always mistakes to be made – and they needn’t even be new ones. I chanced upon an old friend this week when I managed to duplicate a small section of my threading without noticing. I try to guard against doing this by setting up systems for myself. I always thread in clearly defined ‘units’, whether that is units of pattern or (if the pattern is not easily broken down into logical pieces) units of 10 ends. And I always mark off each unit as I have threaded it. Or almost always… And I mark up my threading in other ways, such as adding a note of where each warp section should end, so that I can correlate warp ends remaining with progress through the pattern. Except this time I forgot about that step.

And the consequence was?

Well, just before the middle of the warp I had threaded one set of 10 twice in a row, and I didn’t notice until I reached the end of the warp about 800 ends later. And found I was 10 ends short.

I could have managed with a warp which was 10 ends narrower, but I was using the sectional beam and knew this wasn’t a counting error: it had to be a threading error. So I worked my way back across the warp until I found where I had gone off track. I had rather been hoping that it was a recent error and that I could quickly rethread a hundred ends or so, but deep down I knew it would have been made the previous day, when I had had lots of interruptions and could have easily left a group ‘unticked’ on the threading chart. Fortunately, my systems did mean that it was quick to work backwards to find the place where I had duplicated, so the error was easily identified once I knew it existed.

No, I didn’t re-thread. It would simply have taken too long and I have lots of deadlines coming up. I pulled out the duplicated section altogether (tying a piece of string around the warp ends to save the cross just in case I turned out to be wrong about where I was wrong – well, you never know) and I also went back to the beginning of the warp and pulled out the first ten ends. The threading is intended to be symmetrical so I needed to balance the missing piece at the other end. 10 ends here amounts to about 0.5 cm of warp width: I can live with 1 cm less in total and the fabric is going to be stitched at the sides so the precise patterning is not mission critical.

So far so good. Weaving starts tomorrow, so we’ll see what else may be lurking in the warp. (To be honest I am much more worried about making mistakes in my knitting, as those are things I really struggle to fix.)

Oh, and on the plus side, one result of those interruptions is that I now have a fan inserted in one of the studio windows: there is fresh air to be had! I am now officially hoping for another very hot summer in 2015 so I can compare with this year’s sweltering experience.

And I am finally warping up the Megado for more scarves.

“Tale of a threading error” was posted by Cally on 11 Oct 2014 at http://callybooker.co.uk