Monday, June 27, 2011

The verdict is in

I officially love pineapples.

One center motif with my very first pineapple attached. Turns out it's super easy.
Time for a close-up, lovely little pineapple!
Ok, so I might have become just slightly pineapple obsessed this week.
In fact I couldn't stop myself.
But look how pretty! All I have to do now is several rows of chain edging and a couple of joining motifs in the middle. Then I need to figure out how to block and starch, something I've never bothered to do before.
I took a break here and there from my pineapple frenzy to fix my damn tencel warp. After a close inspection, I realized that my problem wasn't a mere threading error. I had simply skipped over one thread. Twice. (Instead of one thread grouping of 17 threads, I only did 16.) So rather than making a temporary heddle for two threads, I had to untie the warp, unweave the plain weave and header weave I'd done, and take all the threads out of the reed and heddles. GAH!!!

But before I did any of that I inserted the lease sticks back behind the heddles, because to do otherwise would have been madness.

I think even a non-weaver can look at this photo and see the problem. Right there in the middle the black thread goes over two blue threads in a row instead of over and under. This is not something that you can ignore, really.
Luckily, though, I managed to do the first repeat of the pattern correctly, so I only had to re-do two thirds of it. If you can call that luck.
After about three hours of hunching over like a hag and saying bad words when my makeshift reed hook (a smallish steel crochet hook) kept breaking threads, I am now nearly back where I started. Maybe one day I'll even be able to start weaving!
And in the middle of all this nonsense, I also kept plugging away on my sock.

This yarn is definitely too big. I took a close look at the photos in the book the other day, and my stitch definition just isn't where it should be. I'm tempted to get some smaller yarn and start over. Maybe.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Such pretty pineapples!!! And your new sock pattern is quite lovely. I hope you can find a yarn you're satisfied with!!

She said...

Pineapple girl, there is something seriously wrong with you. :)

(But they are very pretty...)