Mechanical Delicacy

This week has been very strange. This show has taken more energy than I understood. On Monday I did my bookkeeping, bank deposit, and such. Then I took a nap and awoke to rain that continued all the way through Tuesday.

I tried to sew more bags and had a short-circuit in the foot pedal. I took this (and my exhaustion) as a sign that it was going to be another day off. It means I'll be working part of Friday, but I'm OK with that. Thank goodness for the TED Lectures podcast through iTunes. I learned a lot while my body was resting.

Today the sun was shining in my window before I woke up. Yay! It's a weaving day. I'd have a set of ruanas woven, cut off, edged and shrunk before bed. Or so I thought...

The loom has been acting funny for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it doesn't advance. Sometimes it lifts the wrong harnesses. Sometimes it behaves like it's in reverse even though it isn't, but only for one pick and only when I'm not watching it. I've gone over the dobby box with a fine-toothed comb, scrubbing between levers with WD-40 and Q-Tips, checking the tension and alignment of every cable, cleaning, tightening and oiling every single moving part.

Everything I tried made it work a little better for a little while, but the problems kept coming back inconsistently.

Finally today I found a tiny nut on the ground under the loom. When I found where it belonged, it was the moment of realization... A tiny 3" cable had "stretched", causing everything else to go out of alignment.







[The bad cable is pulled out of service and replaced with a chain]






[The lever attached to that cable pulls an aluminum finger which advances the pattern pegs...]







[...which push on levers...]







[...which cause harnesses to lift.]

When the cable went bad it was like losing the timing belt in a car. The finger wasn't pulling the pegs all the way against the levers. Therefore, the harnesses weren't always lifting properly. One tiny bead caused weeks of slow and difficult weaving.

The funny thing is that I found and fixed the problem with only two yards left before I take the loom apart and return it to Annie.

And finally, when the weaving was done, it was time to stitch the ends and shrink it. Then the power went out. I thought at first it was the foot pedal again, but noticed that the light was off, too. I checked and, sure enough! The resort was without power late into the night.

I grabbed a pen and paper and worked out some block twill designs for a new cloth I'll be weaving when I get home.