Wednesday, March 9, 2011

One step forward, two back?

This Greenland project is giving me a huge amount of grief.  Aside from the loom breaking when my car was in the shop and the warp giving me untold trouble, I ran into two more problems since my last post.

First, and probably the worst and most demoralizing, I lost an entire days worth of work on my documentation.  It was a concerted day's effort too, I was pretty well done with two full sections when my husband decided that it was time to upgrade my hard drive.  It turns out the old one was failing, but due to the failing and the way it was partitioned, the backups had not worked properly and skipped over a bunch of files, including my documentation.  It ended up reverting to the version I had pre-Sunday edits, which was very rudimentary.  I then spent Monday and part of Tuesday without a computer at all, and will be back to the state soon as I'm getting a new one (which will NOT be partitioned) tonight.

Second, I busted out the ruler and checked my weft thread count on the sample and found that I was getting nothing like the packed weft in the original Greenland cloth with the yarns I was using, so I had to go on a foraging trip to see what I could find that might work better.  Luckily I hit pay-dirt on the first try.  I'm now using a lace-weight merino single and getting 20 to 21 wefts per inch, as opposed to the 14 I was getting before.  Much better!  Even the color of the cloth on the loom is looking better.

So I'm well over a week behind, and feeling discouraged and demoralized, but I guess all I can do is keep pushing forward and do my best.  It's been a learning experience anyway.  I think I need to seriously reevaluate the way I estimate how long a project is going to take.  It's one thing is things go as planned but quite another when Life gets in the way.

Here you can see the fabric in progress with the new weft yarn:

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