My First Mistake

OK.  Full disclosure here.  This is not my first weaving mistake.  I think that probably happened in the first 5 minutes of learning to weave when I was 13 years old.  And I have kept up the tradition of continuing to make mistakes pretty much all of my life.  But the mistake I'm going to talk about here is one I hadn't made before.  Not sure why since it's an easy mistake to make but somehow it's a new one for me.

I warped up the Gilmore loom with 12 yards of cotton/linen yarn for kitchen towels.  I've already talked about how I wound on a couple of sections with the wrong length of warp and had to redo them.  Then I threaded all that yarn through the heddles in my eight harnesses to make the pinwheel pattern I love, sleyed the reed and tied on to the front of the loom.  I wove about 4 inches of fabric before I noticed the error.

Here is a picture of my warp as it comes through the reed.  Can you see it?  Can you see the narrow stripe that is whiter than the surrounding?  Yup.  That's the error.  Instead of pulling two warp threads through that dent in the reed, I pulled four through.  I squished four warp threads in the space that should be occupied by two threads.  I checked the harnesses and the pattern is correct.  Probably you wouldn't notice it at all after the fabric comes off the loom and is washed.  The fabric should relax and look perfect.

I could leave the error and hope it will not be noticeable in the final towels, but to do that I have to look at it while I am weaving the entire 12 yards of fabric.  Nope.  It would drive me nuts.  I will lose the first four inches I've woven so far but I'm willing to sacrifice that small amount, less than 1% of my final length, in order not to dwell on it for the next week or two while I'm weaving.  I've already invested time and yarn in fixing my errors with the first two sections that I warped.  Fixing this new error just seems mandatory.  We always tell new weavers that you can obsess or not at any given point in the process.  Well, at this point I'm obsessing about this silly error.  I'm going to fix it!