8 harnesses on Varpa

Warning to non-weavers: this is a very weaverly post. While you may not understand all the language, I think you’ll still find the photos interesting.

After successfully completing a warp of 4 4harness scarves on my new Varpa, I decided that it was time to give it a run with 8H. I knew I wanted to try my next variation of the snowflake twill. My initial intent was to make silk shawls, as I had before. However, the 20/2 silk that I have now is about 50% finer than the silk I used in April, so I needed to have 50% more threads per inch to achieve a stable cloth. That meant 36 threads per inch, and for a shawl, 700 threads total. Given the fact that I need to produce more finished pieces for the next show in a few weeks, I didn’t want to take the time to wind and thread all those ends, so I went for the same pattern but in scarf width.

That decision made, I did the tie up, beamed the warp & threaded the loom, & set off.

Here are a few pictures of the Varpa all tied up. You can see why it’s said that countermarch looms are just sticks & strings.

Here’s a close up of the lamms & teadles tied up. 16 lamms, each tied to each harness. 8 treadles, each tied to each harness = 64 tie ups. Make each string as close to completely even as possible. With Texsolv, you can’t get them perfect, as the holes are approximately 1 cm apart, so sometimes they’re either a bit high or a bit low.

So I started weaving. I was pleased with the way the piece looked.

But my goodness, the weaving was incredibly slow! That was because the treadles were so close together that I had to really play with the side of my foot to press down just one treadle at a time. Not fun. If you look again at that last photo, you’ll see that those treadles ‘float’ together — by the front of the loom, where my feet are, they touch each other.

I went to Weavolution and asked for other people’s ideas of how to correct this. I already had spacers on the backs of my treadles, which is what people suggested, so I needed to come up with something else.

I thought about it, and decided I’d change the tie up. My Varpa loom is able to accommodate 12 harnesses, even though it only came (to me, at least) with 8. So there are 4 more holes in each of lamms than I need. I figured if I spaced out how the treadles were tied to the lamms, it’d leave some room in between treadles by my feet.

So I climbed inside the loom, and tied my treadles to the lamms using holes 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, & 12. That left holes 3, 6, 7 & 10 empty. Now my treadles were rather in pairs, and I could easily find the one I wanted with my feet. Here’s how the treadles looked after this new tie up system.

So I sat down to weave much more happily.

Hah!

It didn’t take too many picks for me to realize that I had a mistake in my tie up. Actually, I’d tied it up exactly like I’d planned, exactly like my Fiberworks program had shown. But with one switch on treadle 8, I could dramatically improve the design.

Here’s a shot with the cloth before & after the change.

It might be easier for you to see the difference if I show you the bottom of the cloth, where the burgundy color is more pronounced than the top.

Do you see it? Those horizontal lines? Just to make sure you do, here’s a close up of before…

…and after the change.

With all now in place, I easily finished weaving this scarf. Enough warp on the loom for two more, each of which will be a different weft color. Then I’m going back to my beloved counterbalance for a bit, since I can get things done much more quickly at this point, & I need to to produce more in the next two weeks!