Is it already Wednesday?

waste basket of untied ikat tape

 

Tied/Untied

Is it Wednesday already?

Seems I can no longer keep up with what day it is in the week. Yes, it’s Wednesday. Yes, my blog post should be ready. No, it is not ready. What’s going on here?

Ikat untying

Just in case you were wondering,untying ikat tape from the yarn takes almost as much time as untying it. And then there’s the winding onto shuttles. Over the years I have learned that I prefer certain shuttles for this, one called a poke shuttle. I always overfill them because there does not seem to be a good place to cut the continuous weft. 

Filled shuttles with section one

Labeling

Someone asked me about keeping up with which shuttle is which. It just requires labels, many labels. When I’m measuring the yarn for ikat, I label where I start with “bottom left.” When I end the section, I label it “top right.” When I wind onto the shuttles, I start with the top right end, so that I can begin weaving with the bottom left. You have to weave in the direction you measured the yarn, or the pattern will not match up.

You can see in the image below that I am using a ski shuttle. I really don’t like it very well for this, but my other shuttles were full, and there was still a bit of this section of weft left to wind.

Ikat in progress

Weaving ikat

The actual weaving part of ikat goes fast, plus it keeps my interest because it requires attention to matching the pattern and the selvedges. This means that quite a bit of the piece is already woven.

This is such a close-up that you can see how the edges of the color don’t seem even near the right spot, but when it is seen without enlargement, the edges look fuzzy, but not so extreme as this detail.

Detail

Maybe I’ll be finished by the next time Wednesday rolls around.

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