The cloth is coming along, with 8-12 yards a day woven, washed and dried. I am very lucky and thankful that the tension problems on the beam are not affecting the quality of the cloth.

When I was winding the beam, there were so many factors to consider that I neglected to manage an important one. Since my tension box is so wide and my beam sections are so narrow, I tilted it at an extreme angle to make the threads closer together on the way from the box to the beam.


This caused the sections to be uneven. The dark threads stood up higher and the light threads felt looser. I still don't understand quite what happened. Maybe the friction on the "entry comb" was uneven? Maybe the threads rubbing on the edge of the box after the "exit comb" made them tighter?


I was worried that the cloth would be affected. In the most extreme case, it could have turned into 4" seersucker. I was ready with a plan: cut it on the tight stripes and make hundreds of pouchy little bags. Thankfully, this isn't necessary. The cloth is beautiful and doesn't show any sign that the beam wasn't wound perfectly. I'll still make some little bags, but not 75 yards worth.

When I talked it over with Annie, she said, "Well, why didn't you just thread it narrower in the tension box?" Of course! That's what I'll do next time. I'm always learning.

Production weaving is a beast all its own. The goals seem completely at odds: make consistent cloth quickly, and make it look "handwoven." In the eyes of the American customer, consistent cloth looks mass produced and cheap. Of course, my tools are mechanical so the result is completely handmade, but it's not hard to end up with a result that is so consistent that it looks "machine made". Here are the tricks I use to make sure the result is immediately identifiable as handwoven and to make it efficient to produce.

1. Warp color stripes. These do a variety of jobs. They hide lost or doubled threads and make reed marks less evident. Color is the most obvious part of the design and gives people something they can grasp. For now, I'm using neutral-colored warps to retain flexibility in my weft choices.

2. Warp grist variety. Using a variety of yarn weights helps enhance the "handmade" feeling along with improving the effect of the color stripes.

3. Plied weft yarns. By winding several threads onto the bobbin together, an interesting effect occurs. The end-feed nature of the flyshuttle loosely twists the threads as they leave the bobbin. This twist creates an appearance that I call "treebark" after the Japanese name for a similar effect in shibori. (mokume) The effect can be subtle or striking depending on the contrast between thread colors. Either way, it helps a cloth to feel more rich and interesting.

4. Slub yarns. Used in the warp, the weft, or both, these give a little randomness and make a cloth feel more "informal" and "natural."

My goal as a designer is to use each of these factors in such a way that they create a natural overall feeling without any one technique becoming too dominant. It's a dance, and one that I can't wait to explore more and more in the coming years.

Today I'm just posting some quick pictures and getting back to the loom. I wove a sample piece yesterday and wet-finished it. This is all incredibly exciting to me, the culmination of a year's work as an apprentice. The ability to design a stable and pretty cloth and dress the loom to weave it were just dreams a year ago.

Here are some quick snapshots...

I did something with my first wide cloth that is helping me immensely: designed for the width of the section. This turned out to make threading and sleying much easier because I have check points in my work.

As I thread, I know that every "white on the right" section ends with 1-2-3-4. Every "white on the left" section ends with 8-7. If I get to the end of a section and it's not right, I go searching for the problem and fix it. When it's right, I tie an overhand knot and move on.

Sleying is made easier, too. This pattern has 39 threads per section. With a six-dent reed, the sleying is 3-3-3-4. That gives 13 threads every 2/3" or 39 threads every 2". If the last dent doesn't have 4 threads, I go back and find out why.

Incidentally, I make use of the Texsolv heddles to speed up sleying. With one hand holding the tension, the other hand slides heddles over in sleying groups, double checking the threading as I go. For each dent, I carefully lay the threads across the top of the harnesses. When they're all laid out, I grab the auto reed hook and use one hand to grab threads from the layout while the other hand pulls them through the reed.


Since my reed is exactly 60", all this accuracy pays off when I reach the edge and pull the last threads through the last dent. Whew!