Warping catastrophe

I’ve made the below crackle weave design in AdaCAD, but have run out of ‘warp’ threads on my loom, and want to put a new single-colour warp on anyway.

So, time to make my first warp! My friend Seiko had shown me through making my previous one, and I think I remembered all the steps OK.

If you’re a weaver and look at the photo of the grey yarn on my warping frame, you might notice something wrong.. I needed to organise the threads into groups of ten, which I did using the green wool that you can see. To do this I needed to unsecure the ‘cross’ in the warp to the right of the green thread. The cross is formed by the warp alternating between over and a pair of wooden pegs. This is what keeps the threads in a particular order, and it is absolutely crucial to maintain it. Watching a youtube video of a weaver and they are continually saying ‘saftety first’ as they use various clips, knots and elastic bands to make sure the cross isn’t lost. I had tied some yarn around the cross, but then ‘temporarily’ untied it – I needed to access to the cross, in order to organise the threads into the right groups of ten.

Anyway, I forgot to re-tie it, which I remembered as soon as I started taking the warp off the frame and saw the cross lose its form before my eyes. I tried to maintain what was left, but I think it would take hours to try to save it. Now I have a large lump of tangled grey yarn on my desk, as a physical technical debt.

This reminds me of trying to understand “catastrophe theory” by mathematician Rene Thom many years ago. It was fashionable in the 70s, applied to all sorts of fields (the way academics do). Outwardly, it’s pretty bonkers, with all kinds of strange diagrams. I remember one kind of catastrophe being illustrated with a hand drawing of a bird eating its own egg and dying. I wish I could find it now, but here’s a diagram of a ‘cusp’ catastrophe which I think probably relates to my experience of warping.

Anyway I am kind of happy to have experienced this catastrophe. I was cognitively very aware of the importance of maintaining the cross, but now I really know it. It’s like wearing clipless cycling shoes, you know you have to unclip before coming to a stop at traffic lights, but you don’t really know until you fall off your bike in public. Embrace error (and where appropriate, where a helmet).