Waffles, hold the syrup

The new-to-me Gilmore loom continues to draw attention away from other projects. This may become a problem as a deadline approaches, but for now I'm marveling at the seemingly endless variety of weaving possibilities.

I bought 3 cones of Valley Yarns 8/2 Cotton a while ago in anticipation of weaving. There's nothing like advanced planning, huh? But if I remember correctly the yarn was on sale, so it's not like I didn't have a pressing reason to buy it 19 months before I took delivery on the floor loom. Oh but wait, I did have Dorothy. Yeah, that's it. I was going to weave it on Dorothy.

Anyway, I'm not feeling very confident with substituting yarns in weaving projects right now so I searched for a pattern that called for 8/2 cotton and found the Honeycomb Dish Cloth. After a bit of figuring, I worked out what size I could make, how many, and all that good stuff.

Measuring out the warp took quite a while because I needed 436 ends with color changes. I also read the draft wrong so I started out with the wrong number of ends for the first color, but that was easily fixed with the an extra warp chain.

I have to admit, after the difficult time I had sleying the chenille I was reluctant to get going on 4x more ends of thin cotton. But I finally mustered up the courage and got started. I needed 18 dpi in a 12 dpi reed so the sequence was 1-2-2. No major disasters with this step, it all went smoothly but sleying is hard on the body. Taking breaks and stretching helped.

The next step was to thread the heddles. I counted the heddles I needed before I got started (see? I'm learning) and then proceeded to transfer the cross to the other side of the reed. I know, it all sounds like Greek doesn't it? Basically it's a step to help me keep the warp strands in order. If I had one strand per dent I wouldn't have had to do this, but since I had 2 strands in some of the dents I wanted to be able to tell what order those 2 strands should be in. (That explanation probably didn't help at all, did it?) I used Madelyn van der Hoogt's Warping Your Loom DVD method to transfer the cross which made threading the heddles much cleaner.

I had a couple of "oops" during warping. Some how one of the warp chains was mucked up so it wouldn't unravel. It was a warp chain that only had 30 ends in it, so I manually undid the chain and it wasn't a big deal--I must have pulled the end of the chain through the live loop like a bind off. Oops.

Also, I crossed 2 threads in the reed. Oops. It was apparent when opening the first shed so that was easy to fix.

The loom was finally warped and ready for weaving.


Warped

Now I'm treadling and throwing the shuttle and the waffles are forming. It's magic!


Honeycomb Dish Cloth
Free pattern
Ravelry link

About the other project--the one that shall not be named--it's off the loom and stuffed in a bag. It didn't turn out as I expected so I'll blog about it when its time-out is over.