Problem with selvedges

[Mary Godfrey]

Hi Jane and team

I’m weaving a silk and Tencel scarf for a friend and I was just under halfway when I started to have problems with my selvedges. The fibres of the end warp threads (Tencel) on both sides gradually come apart and break after weaving about 8 cm. Also the selvedge on one side has become ‘soft’ meaning that I am having to weave slowly and hold onto the selvedge to prevent the pick pulling it inwards. I’ve put a fold of paper under the last few ends on the warp beam on that side, which does help a bit.

I’m weaving a balanced plain weave sett (8ppcm), and ensuring that the alternate picks go either over of under each other are the edges.

Do you have any suggestions for how I can have better selvedges in future? I sometimes use floating selvedges but still experience the problem with those threads breaking.

[Sandra]

Hi Mary – my gut feeling is that you have uneven tension on your warp 😒 Sometimes the tension feels fine as you start weaving, but as you move your warp forward, uneven tension moves forward with it.  The tight side may have been where you started winding your warp and the looser side where you ended it.  I’d hang a weight from your loose selvedge and ease up your tension a bit on your whole warp to see if that prevents the tight warp from breaking.  Let us know!

[Mary Godfrey]

Thanks Sandra. You may be right about the uneven tension on the warp. I am using a small Ashford warping mill, and it seems to me that the design of it is bound to introduce uneven tension as the ends build up along the pegs during winding. To overcome this I normally make my warps in two or more separate sections, but I didn’t this time because there were only 288 ends (36cm).

I also tend to weave with a tight warp because I find that the Megado moving breast beam gives me a very soft shed. In fact I’m now thinking that perhaps I’m not adjusting the settings on that, so am putting too much tension on manually. I’m going to investigate that as I think it might be the real source of my problem.

The other thing worth noting is that I re-watched Jane’s video about weaving log cabin, and adopted her technique of pulling a little on each weft pick before throwing the shuttle to take up any slack.  That does make a noticeable improvement to the selvedges.

Anyway, the scarf is off the loom now and is just drying after washing. It looks really good.

thank you ago. This forum is invaluable!

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