Exactly 11 months ago, we announced our new fascination with strings, regular expressions, and patterns–using yarn instead of bytes, in the blog article Strung Out and Warped. The process of warping a loom is much like writing computer programs. First, you decide what you want the project to do, then select the materials, write a flow diagram (in weaving, called a draft), then code (wind and thread the warp). Testing is a matter of running through each combination of inputs and outputs, then fixing or redesigning as necessary. In the weaving process (and, sometimes in the programming process as well), a poorly plannned and/or badly executed project sometimes runs out of budget, and the project either gets terminated or shelved and put back in the budget cycle if it is important.
And, so it went. After weaving a couple inches of weft and examining the results, the pattern had some glitches in it. I discovered I had skipped a step in the threading pattern, about 1/3 of the way across the warp. Correcting this problem required unthreading about 100 threads and moving them to the next harness. About 3/4 of the way through this process, real work crept in, and the time budget ran out.
The project sat idle for about nine months. Finally, when a similar fate befell an actual programming project, the Unix Curmudgeon (under some prodding from the Nice Person, who wanted to use the loom the stalled project was tying up) reopened the project and finished threading those last couple dozen warp threads, retied the warp, and started weaving. Again, the testing cycle, a couple of inches of weft later, showed a break in the pattern. This time, it was only a couple threads in the wrong harnesses. Clipping the heddle and tying a new one on the proper harness fixed the problem, and the project proceeded.
The project is a stitched doubleweave, with 8/2 wool on top at 12epi, and 20/2 Tencel at 24epi on the bottom. A short video of the weaving process is here.
The weaving process, once “debugged,” proceeded swiftly. Other than a few issues with maintaining uniform tension between the two different fibers (wool grabs everything, and I broke a warp thread that got doubled over when I advanced the warp), and a couple of weft floats caused by not having enough warp tension (helped by sticky wool warp), the project turned out well. Documentation of projects is also helpful: the first hem end is tabby, while the second hem end is pattern weave, the weaver having forgotten what he did several weeks ago…
The finished product was “fulled’ (rinsed in hot water to let the fiber tension even out and the fabric shrink a bit), and laid out flat to dry. It turned out just a bit wider than planned (the weft tension was not as high as estimated), but exactly the planned length, which was measured while weaving, with a 10% shrinkage allowance.
The completed scarf is a “re-imagining” of a World War I aviators scarf. Modern aviator scarves are silk, but in the original open-cockpit planes of the 1914-1918 era, wool was needed for warmth, and silk for wiping engine oil from goggles and instruments. Most of the early combat planes on both sides used rotary engines (not to be confused with the Wankel rotor engine). These engines used a lot of oil, which was usually castor oil, which does not dissolve in gasoline. Without a model to work from, I decided to try to create a two-sided scarf using stitched double-weave. The weave structure does not separate the fibers, but the wool is dominant on one side and the tencel, a modern silk substitute, is dominant on the other. The result is interesting, if not quite what I expected.
Unlike computer software, where the bugs can be removed by patching and performance improved by refactoring, a woven cloth is what it is, unless the errors are caught and corrected while weaving. The knot where the warp thread broke shows as a woolly spot on the tencel side and the inadvertent weft floats show as well in the pattern. The two misthreading errors were corrected, but the item was not rewoven, so they show in the first couple of inches. But, the discipline required to weave well should also improve my coding skills, as coding errors are easier to correct if caught early, and refactoring during development (like reweaving to remove mistakes) results in a better product.