A finishing day

Today I spent most of the day involved with finishing.  I finished the first piece on the current warp:

I actually finished the weaving part just before I wanted to go to bed and then wove in a bar, put glue to hold it once I cut off the first piece and then went to bed.

This morning I took out the variegated thread you can see right of center in the photo on the left and replaced it with a solid color and cleaned up the back of the loom once that change had been accomplished.  Once again,hemostats have proven their worth to me.  If you follow the link (click on the highlighted word, hemostat) you can find the best place I know to buy them.  Note:  when you buy them at flea markets, they may have been fished out of hospital trash; those should be sterilized because they almost certainly have been used in contact with blood.

I use hemostats to clamp the warp ends I want to add (to replace a broken end or to replace a whole section of the warp as now) to the rest of the warp, tensioning the new end(s) to match the tension of those warp ends on either side of the new one(s).  I place the hemostat as far back in the warp as I can so that I can weave for quite a distance before having to get up and move it back farther. Nothing dangles which is a good idea, considering:

Bob is quick as a minute and misses nothing.  Dangling objects are, in his experience, better than catnip.  He likes catnip but LOVES to bat at things that dangle!

I have been trimming turned back ends of wefts, inspecting for any skips and mending those (with the air of an illuminted magnifier) and hemming the pieces cut from the loom today and from the warp before this one.  It's fiddly work but necessary before I wash to finish the pieces properly.

It's Saturday night and I am spending it at home.  It's starting to rain outaide and will snow tomorrow;  it's good to be inside, dry and warm.