Anyway, here are the tools of the trade. First, the fringing stand, which holds the scarf tightly in place. The first scarf is done, and the next is queued up to be twisted:
And the necessary accessories:
The Conair battery-powered fringe twister, the magnifying goggles so I can actually see those pesky 60/2 ends and count out groups of ends accurately, the comb to straighten out the ends prior to twisting, the snips and seam ripper to tease out the 4 picks of waste yarn that hold everything in place until I begin twisting. Couldn't do the job without 'em!
By the end of the day, I had one-and-a-half scarf twisted; that's all my hands can stand. The twister is a terrific help, but I still have to do the beginning and the last bit manually. Maybe 3 of the scarves will come to the KPFA show with me... maybe more; we'll see.
5 comments:
Not my fav part either, but necessary in so many cases....
cheers,
Laura
who is almost caught up on the ft - time to make more????
When you begin and end a scarf, could you put in a pick of waste yarn that would go over and under the amount of threads you wanted to group so you could have them "pre-counted" so to speak. Remove that yarn as you go along.
Teena Tuenge
haven't met a weaver who likes twisting fringes!
I used to do it ALL by hand, although admittedly I wove far less than you do. And I wasn't using such fine thread. Good luck at KPFA!
Hi, Teena,
I do that, in a way. The first and last 4 picks are plain weave, which in an interleaved threading makes the weft go over 2, under 2, etc. so each half of the plied fringe gets 12 threads, or 6 pairs of threads. The problem is the fineness of the thread - these aging eyes don't do "fine" as well as they used to. The waste thread needs to be able to hold everything in place, so I've never considered using anything but plain weave there. A structure with very long floats would be difficult both because it would allow the fell to droop, and because with an interleaved networked threading, it's impossible to create a structure that lifts the right threads to make any sort of regular float system.
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