Another Towel in the Series

This towel has a weft of apricot-colored mercerized 20/2 cotton. The draft is from handweaving.net, in a pattern that reminds me of lines left in sand by retreating wavelets. Keep in mind that the dark/light areas are reversed, because I'm weaving in color on a natural warp, as opposed to the usual draft convention of dark warp, light weft.



This should make a very textury cloth, which is always a plus for a towel - more absorbent that way.



And in extreme closeup (click to enlarge further):



I had a very scary moment yesterday at the end of my weaving stint. Shaft 1 got snagged on something (possibly the fly-shuttle cord?) and cast off its spring completely, both ends at once, which made a very strange noise (don't you hate that? you're weaving along and something suddenly doesn't sound right). After I reattached the spring, that shaft wouldn't rise. At all. The solenoid wasn't popping. At all. Naturally, I had woven almost 2 inches before I noticed that some of the reed marks were a little more prominent because one thread next to the mark wasn't being interlaced, and some weft floats were longer than expected. Damn! Unweaving 2 inches at 40 ppi is not fun. After a long period of un-fun and consequent swearing, I got back to the place where it all started to go wrong, and decided to run the AVL solenoid test, which pops solenoids in order. In this case, it popped 2 through 24 politely enough, but not #1. Silence there.

I was about to send a panicky email to AVL (yeah, right, like someone would read it late afternoon on the Friday after New Years Day!). However, after taking a short break to think things through, I adjusted the tension on the spring, then ran a test file that lifts one shaft at a time (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) and lo and behold, solenoid #1 popped and shaft #1 obediently lifted. So say a little prayer that all is well in compu-dobby-land today, please!