A ribbon of thread
9 December 2020 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeWell, it worked... sort of.
click for closeups
I rethreaded my eight cards with extreme care, using the original groups of four threads unknotted and separated out again, and lo and behold it did work, eventually. When I wedged the end behind the staircase and held the end of the threads in my left hand, I was able to turn the cards with complete ease.
And oddly enough I actually got a neater start to the braid than when I was doing it with wool; the threads just packed flat immediately.
But it's definitely not a viable solution to the idea of manufacturing ribbon. First of all, I'm not good enough at it (the ribbon illustrated was supposed to be the result of a steady pattern of eight turns one way followed by eight turns the other way, which should theoretically have produced a consistent zigzag pattern!) I constantly lose track of which way I'm turning the cards every time that one of the threads snags up over a corner and/or one card fails to turn properly and I have to use both hands to sort it out. I still get stripes and tags of weft sticking out all over the place.
Secondly, it's incredibly slow, partly no doubt because I couldn't get a steady rhythm up and partly due to the scale of the work; it took me three sessions of well over an hour each to achieve eight inches of ribbon, and the result is only an eighth of an inch wide. I'd need more cards, and while each pass of the shuttle itself wouldn't take any longer, the threading-up process would get more and more difficult, and the possibilities for tangling ever more frequent.
Thirdly, after eight inches I found that the threads snagged up so often that it became impossible to continue; the pattern was getting messier and messier and I was simply spending all my time untangling and resetting the pack every time the cards failed to turn properly. I don't know if it was the angle of the remaining thread (though I got much closer to the end using a wool warp before I had to stop) or simply wear and tear on the cards; I had to take one of the address-label tags off because the thread running through that card persistently caught under it. So even if I spent hours and hours threading up a larger pack of cards and used a longer set of warp threads and deployed some kind of row counter to let me keep better track of the pattern, and dedicated hours to the task working very very carefully, my chances would be pretty low of generating a sufficient length of custom ribbon rather than ending up with an unworkable mess. Towards the end I tried pinning the start knot to my jumper again so that I could theoretically weave with both hands, but it didn't help at all with the tangling problem when turning the cards.
Tablet weaving *can* be done with thread, but I'm not sure it's a good idea.
click for closeupsI rethreaded my eight cards with extreme care, using the original groups of four threads unknotted and separated out again, and lo and behold it did work, eventually. When I wedged the end behind the staircase and held the end of the threads in my left hand, I was able to turn the cards with complete ease.
And oddly enough I actually got a neater start to the braid than when I was doing it with wool; the threads just packed flat immediately.
But it's definitely not a viable solution to the idea of manufacturing ribbon. First of all, I'm not good enough at it (the ribbon illustrated was supposed to be the result of a steady pattern of eight turns one way followed by eight turns the other way, which should theoretically have produced a consistent zigzag pattern!) I constantly lose track of which way I'm turning the cards every time that one of the threads snags up over a corner and/or one card fails to turn properly and I have to use both hands to sort it out. I still get stripes and tags of weft sticking out all over the place.
Secondly, it's incredibly slow, partly no doubt because I couldn't get a steady rhythm up and partly due to the scale of the work; it took me three sessions of well over an hour each to achieve eight inches of ribbon, and the result is only an eighth of an inch wide. I'd need more cards, and while each pass of the shuttle itself wouldn't take any longer, the threading-up process would get more and more difficult, and the possibilities for tangling ever more frequent.
Thirdly, after eight inches I found that the threads snagged up so often that it became impossible to continue; the pattern was getting messier and messier and I was simply spending all my time untangling and resetting the pack every time the cards failed to turn properly. I don't know if it was the angle of the remaining thread (though I got much closer to the end using a wool warp before I had to stop) or simply wear and tear on the cards; I had to take one of the address-label tags off because the thread running through that card persistently caught under it. So even if I spent hours and hours threading up a larger pack of cards and used a longer set of warp threads and deployed some kind of row counter to let me keep better track of the pattern, and dedicated hours to the task working very very carefully, my chances would be pretty low of generating a sufficient length of custom ribbon rather than ending up with an unworkable mess. Towards the end I tried pinning the start knot to my jumper again so that I could theoretically weave with both hands, but it didn't help at all with the tangling problem when turning the cards.
Tablet weaving *can* be done with thread, but I'm not sure it's a good idea.
