End feed shuttle tension & selvedges

Having been reminded by Peg of Weavecast, the downloadable podcast from Syne Mitchell, I've just been happily sitting in my rocking chair, knitting the cuff at the end of the first sleeve of the jumper I'm working on, and listening to the latest episode. The only complaint I have about Weavecast, and this is a feeble complaint, is that it gives me more ideas of different things to do... and I already have a head full of ideas! I love Weavecast because it expands my knowledge of weaving and introduces me to other weavers, and it is very good indeed. Syne is just the person to do a broadcast like this on weaving. She has a sense of wonder and inquistiveness that she is able to express in a way that takes you with her. I don't feel like I'm an isolated weaver sitting at home on my own on a cold winter's night, with Weavecast I'm somewhere else, with Syne saying "now here's something to interest you..."

Back to my own weaving.

You may remember that I'm not entirely happy about my selvedges. The good news is... they have just improved no end. Look at the awful untidy mess in this next photo:












This was in a header row at the start of a sample warp. It is so bad, the worst I've woven recently. I could not carry on without fixing it.

I looked carefully. The other selvedge was perfect. How odd. I wove a few more picks, and noticed that the yarn didn't pull tight at the right hand edge, but did at the left where I was applying additional tension with my fingers.

I looked at my shuttle. It's a Crossley end feed shuttle with a Honex tension device - the yarn runs through a clip that is tensioned by using a screw to adjust a spring that presses on the clip. I used a different shuttle for a few rows, no problem. So, it had to be time to adjust the tension. Again, it was because of reading Peggy Ostercamp's books that I was more alert to this as a potential problem than previously. Out with the screwdriver, and this problem was soon fixed.



See - this is so much better!

The cloth you are looking at here is a 5-end repeat advancing twill, treadled in the same pattern as the threading.





Now for anyone not familiar with an end feed shuttle, here, posing with my Schacht boat shuttle (top) are three different Crossley end feed shuttles that I was lucky enough to obtain from Crossley's, of Todmorden, Lancashire, England, before they closed their business down, in 2006 (another family manufacturing business lost with the demise of the British textile industry, although I understood that their last industrial mill customer was in Canada).

The shuttles are beautiful objects, lovely to handle, as well as being good shuttles and a pleasure to use. They were designed for handweaving, therefore do not have metal tips (as fly shuttles do).

Each one is different, and code numbers on two of them indicate that one was made in 1993, the other in 2006, both are also marked AVL. A member of the Weavetech yahoo list who wanted some of these shuttles followed up this clue and discovered that AVL still have a few in stock.

And the next photo shows how the yarn runs through the tensioning device. The adjustments are made with a screw accessed from the side of the shuttle.

Autumn inspiration.

I took these photos in early November, of the autumn colours. They were all taken around our garden, before the first frost. I was looking for interesting combinations of colour and texture. I don't use a sketchbook often, but I have many photos. From the days before I used a digital camera, I have a box of envelopes with labels like "bark", "trees", "leaves", "landscapes".

These photos might be the starting point for future designs, but whether or not they lead on to anything else, I find it useful to have spent the time looking carefully at, and thinking about, colour, texture and form.

My camera is a Canon EOS 350D. It cost more than my weaving loom. But it is a very versatile camera and can take very high quality images - I have done some professional photography in the past, and wanted to have that possibility for the future.

These photos are here for sharing, if you want to make use of them for art or craft design work, please go ahead.

Another tweak to my loom set up..

Again, thanks to Peggy Ostercamp, I'd read about this in her book (p.61, Warping Your Loom & Tying on New Warps) and then I noticed it happening on my loom. See the distorted apron rod, below. This photo of the the warp at the back of the loom was taken as I got to the end of weaving a narrow sample warp.








I expect that this has happened before, and I didn't see because I didn't look.

I think the problems with this are: potential for strain or breaking the rod, and possiblilty of un-even warp tension. Peggy's advice is to reduce the strain by only using ties where the warp is, see below the instant improvement when I had undone the excess ties.