I've been pondering this dilemma all day, and now I'm asking you for help. Here is my beautiful, freshly threaded warp yesterday afternoon. I finished threading and tying on, left the loominaria for a cup of tea, and came back to this beautiful view. There are few things more lovely to a weaver than the promise of a freshly threaded warp.
After the tea was done and I had woven the hem and maybe six pattern picks, I saw the mistakes. There were bunched tabby threads, which is what gave it away. When the double-threaded reed gives you the gap-toothed smile, you know you're in trouble.
And the worst part is that I knew something was up when I finished and there were five threads left over. I'm usually pretty fastidious about my counting. It's calculating the pattern that usually challenges me. This was not the issue.
I slept on it, and in the wee hours this morning, I pulled the offending threads out and tried to track down where they went wrong. I had to group the pattern into its groups again, to go over each thread.
I found the offenders quickly, once they were grouped. The first one was two fours together, missing their buddy, three. I slipped in the replacement heddle, shown here for those of you who don't know the magic of the $3.50 replacement heddle from Halcyon yarn. They are priceless when you calculate the grey hair you save without them! Though, would I really notice any less grey hair?
The next clump was not so easy to decipher, though I counted and counted and counted. And then I saw it: 3-4-3-4-3-2-3-4-3-4-3 was missing its last 3-4-3. The warp went straight from 4 to 2, which makes two tabby threads run together. There were the missing five threads: one from the missing 3 between the two fours and four from 3-4-3-4-3 turning into 3-4-2.
Here's the gap. It's five inches from the right side of the warp. The warp is 32 inches wide, 773 threads. I could hang four threads off the back beam on weighted bobbins and be on my way, except for those pesky five threads on the left end that will constantly need yanking to keep them out of the way, plus moving the hanging bobbins' rubber bands and weights after each warp advance. Or, should I simply cut the warp at the woven part and completely rethread the warp? If I rethread, I risk making other mistakes. It's what usually happens, especially in a warp this big. I lose my attention span, I stop to direct pet misbehavior or the phone rings. It's bound to happen.
Dear Readers, What would you do?
The craft going well right now is knitting, and here is my sock to prove it. You can see the leaf now, winding it's way down the sock. The second one is almost done, and I think that's all I'll have yarn for before I need to turn the heel. I think it's quite lovely, and the notorious p2tog tbl actually only repeats four times in the pattern before the leaf shaping becomes far less obnoxious.
And you may not have known it, unless you're my facebook friend, but yesterday was National Pie Day. I celebrated by making Cornish Pasties, small meat pies, and one big streusel-topped apple pie. After I finished tangling with my wayward warp, I had a big piece of it for breakfast. Pie, breakfast of Champions!
I hope your Monday was sweet, too!
Maggie
This beautiful, sunny, spring-like weekend should have found me outside, building walkways or taking down the Christmas lights (yes, they're still up! Gotta problem with that?), but instead, I had a deadline to meet. There are two babies for these blankets, and one of them came two weeks early, late Saturday night. This is the very beginning of the first one, with one motif tone-on-tone, the next in the hand-dyed baby blue, then on to the body in tone-on-tone.
