Back at the Beginning Again, Tea Towels on 8 Shafts

I have a history of weaving tea towels in January.  It gives me a chance to focus on my posture at the loom while creating something beautiful.  This year is no exception so I chose a fairly straightforward pattern that I have modified significantly.

I pulled a warp in 2/8 cotton using some really bright and happy colours, pink, green, blue and magenta.  I wanted to work with summer colours while we are in the middle of Vancouver Islands greyest months.

I chose my pattern and then proceeded to make fairly bold stripes.  When I do this I work only half of the pattern and then use PCW Fibreworks to mirror the first half.  This makes sure that the placement of stripes is even across the fabric.  I let the program do the work for me.

I made the warp, which was a tad painful due to all of the colour changes and popped it on the loom.  Threading the warp was my next step and then tying on went well.

I chose to weave the first tea towel with navy weft and it wasn’t very far along that I noticed something amiss.  There was a 9 thread float dead centre of my warp! 

It took a bit of sleuthing, but what appears to have happened is that when I mirrored the threading on the computer I must have deleted a single thread and boom.....9 thread float.

I really didn’t want to pull the entire warp off the loom, so I cut out what I had woven and at this point I decided I didn’t like the navy weft.

I un-sleyed half of the reed, up to centre where the error was and added two string heddles to the warp. I hung these two floating warp threads and, Bob’s your uncle, I’m ready to move forward.

While I was looking on the computer to find the error, I also decided to change up the treadling and I’m very pleased with the change, so a new treadling and a new weft colour;  I guess my mistake was meant to be!

I’m still really enjoying knitting hats at the moment and this is my very first original pattern.  It hasn’t been blocked yet, but I think its a winner.