Weaving with rayon chenille, you are pretty much confined to plain weave unless you work hard to stabilize the yarn in some fashion. Since it is plain weave, my approach to designing a line of rayon chenille scarves is to make short warps (two scarves only), lots of stripes, lots of saturated colours.
So why, you might ask, is there only one pink scarf on the top of that pile?
I was cutting my 'losses', that's why.
I had just finished weaving the first scarf when a warp end broke. No worries - I added in a repair thread intending to 'fix' it Kerstin's way by weaving the old end alongside the repair end when the original warp end was long enough.
So I wove about 12 inches, threaded the broken end into the same heddle as the repair end, pinned it in place and commenced weaving. Whereupon another end broke. ??? Sigh. Add in another repair end, fiddle around weaving the broken end in at the same time as the repair end and.....a third warp end broke.
At this point my patience, never very thick on the ground, evaporated and the scissors came out. I cut off the warp, cut the finished scarf away from the rest of the warp and tossed the balance into the recycle bin.
Yes, I just threw a few dollars of yarn away. No, I don't feel the least bit guilty.
My time is much more valuable and I could see that if the broken ends continued, I'd be investing a lot more of my labour into that one scarf than I could hope to get back by selling it, all the while knowing it was riddled with broken/repaired ends.
Time to move on to the next in hopes that it would be more co-operative. MIMO, after all and it was getting to the point where I was putting maximum effort into it and getting nothing but aggravation for my pains. Look forward. Move on.
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2 comments:
Bravo for you! I remember when I used to teach machine embroidery long before the machines that did it for you...so every session never fail - I would have on the list bring 3 empty bobbins...and there would sit someone tediously winding off the thread that was on her one and only bobbin to save for another project. This went on for a good 20 minutes typically. The first time I let it go, after that, I said - what color is it? And I threw them a new spool of thread and said - pull it off and throw it away already. There is a point of spending a dollar to pick up a dime. But, that was a new one for me...of course I have about 12 dozen bobbins for each machine as it is anyway. LOL
I did that with a 9 yard cotton warp - never even got it on the loom. It was so tangled and nasty, that I couldn't wind on more than an inch at a time.
I was very glad to see it gone!
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