Broken threads

The warp threads have had me frustrated for a while now, since they’ve started breaking en masse and I’ve spent more time trying to mend the warp than actually weaving. To make the threads sturdier, you can use hair spray or gelatin, or those were the suggestions I had (although flax seeds can be used as well, at least on linen weaves). Gelatin has much more of a historical probability than hair spray, and that combined with my disinclination of breathing in an excess of hair spray fumes made the choice quite easy. Gelatin it is.

Mixing gelatin powder into almost boiling water

From a historical perspective, it’s probable that they made the gelatin from bones, but I took a shortcut with gelatin powder.

I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but I took approximately one teaspoon into approximately 1-2 deciliters (not very accurate numbers, I know!) of nearly boiling water and stirred until the powder had dissolved. I tried a bit of the water on my fingers, and once it had dried my fingers were sticky, which made me think it was a good enough mixture. I’m sure that there are better instructions of this somewhere on the internet, but this improvised mix also works!

Painting the warp with invisible gelatin-water-mix

I think the process of treating the warp threads with gelatin (or something similar) is called sizing, but it might also refer to something that is done to the yarn in the very beginning, before setting up the warp. But if you, like me, realize about 1.5 m in that the warp threads are breaking faster than you can mend them, then a paint brush works just as well to apply the gelatin-water-mix.

The other side of the loom

After the warp threads had dried, the threads were a bit sturdier, but also abundant in static electricity. The static electricity is however a small price to pay for threads that don’t break!

Ok, maybe there has been a few breaks since the gelatin-mix, but nowhere near as much as there were before, as you can see below.

Much less broken threads!

Thanks to the non-broken threads, I wove 15 cm today. This is a good thing since the end of this project (at least in terms of time) is drawing near at an alarming pace. But since it’s snowing outside today I can still pretend I have lots of time left until summer…