Losing by Inches

 This is a tale of frustration; I wanted to weave something interesting and the front picture of the Best of Weaver’s Summer & Winter Plus looked good. 

I wanted to weave the runner with the traditional Summer and Winter colouring, which is one colour for the warp and two colours for the weft but I am lazy so I decided to turn the draft so I didn’t need two shuttles.  But I actually forgot to turn the draft after I fiddled with it; all I did was swap the warp and weft thread colours so I ended up with this

The draft contains a three thread float that was highlight by my warp colours and it also made weird ridging of the runner. I hated the weird shape of the circles and I hated the line going up the centre of two circles.  So that was my first inch that I wove then unwove. 

First I tried to fix the draft by changing the treadling and adding different tie ups for the plain weave but nothing worked; but I had to try it because I didn’t want to rethread.  So I went back to the draft and this time I actually turned the draft not just swap the warp and the weft colours. 

I don’t really remember all that I did but I was able to get rid of the three thread float, the line down the centre and I made the circles rounder.

I actually wove an inch and unwove before I got to this picture, my beat was too soft.  But this time I had the beat but do you see the issue?  The bottom inch is different than the top inch above the line.

The reed was sleyed two per dent, one of the straw and one of the red.  There was two picks of plain weave then hem stitching and the hemstitch must have pulled some of the straw warp under the red warp threads.  The treadling left the straw threads mostly on the bottom so they never were moved back into position until the treadling for the line.  The line treadling corrected the positions of the threads.

So I unwove yet again.  The fix was easy I just added the line treadling after the hem stitching and everything worked out.

So now that I have got past the first inch of the runner; now I'm on the home run just 47 more inches to go!