Hi all,

With the end of my wedding-dress project in sight (I'm trying to complete it by Feb 15), I'm contemplating a project that mixes elastic and regular yarns in the warp for a collapse weave.  The only thing is that the lycra yarn is (of course) stretchy!

My thought was to wind the lycra yarn onto my warping wheel through a tension box, i.e. under tension (to stretch it out as much as possible), and then wind it onto the sectional beam under tension as well (via the warping wheel's brake).  I want it to collapse as much as possible when it comes off the loom.  The regular yarn would be wound on under no tension but would go on the warp under the same tension as the lycra yarn.

My question is, do I need two warp beams to keep the yarns properly tensioned during weaving?  I'm guessing yes, and was thinking of doing it by hanging the regular yarn in chains off the back end of the loom and weighting each chain separately, while the lycra is wound onto the warp beam.  Do I need to do this? and if I do, how many chains should I make? 

I am probably going to do 1" stripes of elastic and regular yarns, alternating, on a 20" warp.  I'd rather not have to unchain and manually "advance" 10 separate chains of the regular yarns every 18", but I'll do it if necessary.  The warp for this one will only be about 3.5 yards long so it wouldn't be that many advances.

This will be my first attempt at weaving with fingering weight yarn!  I've never woven with a yarn that heavy.  After the superfine yarns for the wedding-dress, this will be instant gratification!!!

Tien

 

Comments

Mon, 01/25/2010 - 14:20

ingamarie

HI Tien.. funny you should ask . I just came back from a weekend workshop on Collapse Weave with Giovanna Imperia in the Texas Hill Country. We used alternating stripes of elastic and non-elastic yarns. We would the non-elastic (in this case linen) yarns on our beams and then hung individual bouts of the elastic yarns from clamps off the back. We wound the elastic yarns in a figure eight on the arms of the clamp.. straight from the warping board. They were 3" clamps and quite heavy. We used different elastic yarns, mine was a wool crepe from Habu, there were also some with elastane in them. You can hang the weights/ clamps so that they are almost to the floor, then you don't have to unwind them so often . Alternatively use a second back beam.  You do want to weight the elastic yarn as much as possible to get the maximum collapse. The other thing is to use an open sett (2/3 of plain weave) and finer yarns will tend to mover more than heavier yarns.

Have fun!

marie

Elastic yarn hung off the back beam

Mon, 01/25/2010 - 14:31

tien (not verified)

Thanks for the tips!!  That is really helpful.  I won't be able to start on the project for a few weeks yet, but I'm looking forward to it!  It's for the Handwoven Magazine sock yarn challenge, so I'll be using fairly thick yarns, but hopefully it will work out anyway!

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