Friday, February 27, 2015

Loom is fixed.

Where are the days going?  One more day and it'll be autumn; must make the most of the sunshine while we have it.

So, I finished two garments for the Festival fashion parade and I hear they have both been accepted and I finished three pieces for the Exhibition, well one really, the other two were woven last year.  Selection is next week.

Since then I have been working on trying to solve the fault with my compu dobby loom.  As I wove away it would just stop, like putting your foot on the car accelerator and nothing there.  Sometimes it would happen after two pics or 200, or anything in between, very inconsistent.  I could trace it back to the start of last year when I changed computers.  We tried everything we could think of to fix the problem and in the end I gave up and accepted it was as good as it would get.  Seems a strange thing to say but I was kind of relieved to learn of another weaver with same loom and same problem and then a third, so, OK this had to be fixed.

Many emails have gone back and forth, even across the Tasman sea.  As I was reading some of them to Peter a light bulb went off, he emailed No. 1 son who came back with the solution to my problem.  Not a hic cup since but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be the answer to the fixit of the other two looms.  I am so grateful to all the help from the weaving community and it is such a pleasure to be weaving properly.

If you're interested it was because I was using a 9 pin to USB converter cable which are notoriously unreliable.

What did I weave on while testing the loom?  Cotton linen towels which I tied on to the previous warp.  This one is echo weave with a pale green (which looks dirty white) ramie weft over green cotton and olive cotton linen.  I didn't realise I was getting long floats at the points, probably not the best for towels.  Don't know how the ramie will work as a towel but this experiment will let me know.
 And the last one is 4 colour double weave which is looking rather exciting though in reality not so bright.  What is showing violet is more a grey.  There are a couple of others on the roll so look forward to seeing them soon.  A fun way to experiment.

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