A Shawl Woven With a Supplementary Warp

I'm excited that I'm finally getting this piece woven off of my loom. It is a very pretty warp, so I was reluctant to just give up on it. But the metallic silver supplementary warp was fiddly, so finding motivation to just weave it off once the initial push to beam was done was lacking.

I weighted the supplementary warp with water bottles off the back of the loom. The initial tie on with a slight amount of weight in each bottle went well, but I needed to increase the weights in the bottles so that the warp would get pulled taut. Otherwise, you end up with the supplementary warp having enough slack in it to start pulling up little loops in the warp as you weave. Since I'm not weaving velvet, I wanted the supplementary warp to lay flat.

So what does this extraordinary finicky loom set up look like, you ask? Like this:




The silver warp kind of bunches and twirls up. It has a lot of elasticity for a simple metallic. The weight pulls it out straight, and having the bottles on the other side of the back beam allows the weight to distribute out a bit.

But the cloth that's weaving off is really lovely:



I like the way the space-dyed yarn is interacting with itself. Weaving with space-dyed yarn is a bit of a crap shoot. If the color regions are aligned you can end up with pooling. What's pooling? Well, here's a post by YarnHarlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) that has a picture that is the epitome of what pooling can be. (Not one of Steph's better posts. She really was cranky that day. But that's a stunning picture of exactly what pooling is/does.)

Most of the time, however, my space-dyed yarns just end up looking muddy or indistinct. I have succumbed on an occasion to the idea of using space-dyed yarn as a pattern yarn in an overshot or other heavily patterned weave that uses tabby. Unfortunately, the eye can't follow both the pattern and the color changes and typically it ends up looking washed out. You're better off using the space-dyed yarn as the tabby in the warp and weft, but then you'd better like the way the yarn looks wound into a ball because that's what it's going to look like in the plain weave structure.

There's a bit of striping going on in this web, but it's striping of a subtle, good sort. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this project again. So it's ticking along quite nicely. I should have it woven off by this weekend. I wonder what I'll do when the loom is free?

My only gotcha on this warp is its length. You'd think, by now, that I'd throw on a couple of extra feet of warp just in case. But no, I'm going to be weaving up to the knots on this one. I've already planned to re-leash the water bottles with long ties so that they can hang off the back but allow the metallic warp to be woven all the way up to the heddles. I'm still about 24-30" from that scenario, though. A day of weaving.