A while back, I acquired some cheap 10/2 mercerized cotton warp from a Facebook seller so I could try weaving a finer fabric than my usual heavy rugs and upholstery fabrics. Prior to this project, I hadn't ever warped my loom with anything finer than 8/4 cotton rug warp. I settled on a small snowball draft from Estes' Miniature Overshot monogram and set to work on the largest threading I'd ever attempted, of over 400 threads (gasp!).
Some pretty severe tension problems reared their ugly head halfway through the first project, and it only got progressively worse as I continued. By the end of my blue sampler, I had random bits of junk tied onto overlapping bouts of warp threads in the back of my loom in a vain effort to weigh down the loose threads. It helped me limp through, but it was a tear-your-hair-out nightmare back there for the sake of minor improvements out front. I didn't want to make things worse, and I'm always loath to use up more loom waste, but it was bad enough that I decided it would be worth it to cut off the first two projects and re-tie the warp. So I did...on both ends.
It was a mess, but I took it slow. I unwound the entire warp beam (I think there was just over two yards left, at that point) and secured it out front to my seriously-heavy-duty telescope tripod, as if I was warping with the direct method. I re-tied each bout to the warp beam in the back, and then oh-so-carefully wound it back on. I was extra careful to tug tight and maintain even tension as I went. In the end, it was SO worthwhile. My tension problems pretty much disappeared, and weaving the final two hand towels went much, much better.
Besides the tension, my final pair of tea towels also benefitted from a little treadling modification to square-up the overshot pattern. Try though I might to beat it square, I simply could not compress the weft enough to get it there. Part of this is the extremely light beater of my 22" Harrisville, but I was also using any old yarn for my pattern weft, which 10/2 cotton at 24 epi simply couldn't handle. In light of that, I removed significant chunks of the original treadling directions to compress the pattern as much as possible while still maintaining the overall shape of it. In overshot projects I've done since this one, I've sett my warp at 20 epi instead of 24, with excellent results. It may shrink a little more in the wet finishing process, but the pattern comes out quite square.
In the summer of 2020, I've spent quite some time improving my weaving game by signing up for a free month subscription to Long Thread Media and getting access to all of their online workshops. Madelyn van der Hoogt's overshot video gives an in-depth explanation of the theory behind overshot as a weave structure, and how to read various drafts. I'd already gotten the basic idea of it from the project above, but there's always more to know about weave structures & design theory. As a self-taught weaver, I had to watch it several times to wrap my head around some of the more complex ideas.
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