Saturday, May 18, 2013

Warp weighting for weaving with sprang

Remember my initial tensioning system for weaving with sprang, using soup cans?  Since then I have acquired quite a little collection of fishing weights.  And last Christmas, my Secret Santa added some more to that collection.  Plus he introduced me to something really cool called Tool Dip.  I guess it's for coating your hand tools with a rubberized coating.  But it works great at coating lead fishing weights, too.  You can get it in clear or colors, but I found a kit with the clear stuff and additives so you can mix your own colors.  My weights are all different shapes and sizes, so I color-coded them according to weight.

When I am weaving with weighted sections of warp, I will experiment to find the "right" weight to tension a section to weave well, and adjust the tension on my beamed warp with the warp beam and brake system.  Then I will use a weight proportional to the width of each section I am weighting.  For example, if I had sprang sections with 24, 36 and 48 threads in them, I might use 8 oz, 12 oz and 1 lb weights on them respectively.

You will often use weights to tension supplementary warp as well, especially if whatever you are doing with the supplementary warp causes it to "take up" at different rates.  The same approach would work for that type of application.

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