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Sunday, January 17, 2010

The Learning Curve

It was an instructive afternoon. Here's my workspace:



The chair fits nicely in the space between the heddles and the warp beam. After some practice with scrap yarn, the knotter mostly works:



This is the most significant portion of the workspace - my lap, covered with a worn, stained press cloth so I can see the black yarns.

In the picture above, you see what is supposed to happen. A knot, two trimmed ends, etc. However, if you don't hold the two yarns in exactly the right position within the knotter's mechanism, and under exactly the right tension, instead of a knot and trimmed ends, what you get is just trimmed ends but no knot. At that point, I resort to a hand-twisted knot, because I don't want to shorten the new warp overmuch.

After a couple of hours, this was my progress. Exactly one section (60 warp ends) knotted and pulled through.



I'm praying that practice makes perfect, so it goes faster for the remaining 15 sections!

2 comments:

neki desu said...

may the knot fairy assist you.

Lynnette said...

It's funny how things suddenly appear, one daya complete unknown and the next day they appear! Your knotter falls into this category,this is the second blog to feature it recently; what an amazing machine! Sorry to hear that it isn't consistent....good luck with tying on - a task that often daunts me.