Sizing etc.

One of the calming things about weaving tapestry
is that what you weave is what you get:
 the work on the loom looks pretty much as it does when it is done.
At least this is the case with my tapestries.**
Even wet finishing  (total immersion in warm soapy water), doesn't change the images, though it does improve the hand and drape of the cloth.

**If using some weft faced techniques, wedge weave for instance, tapestry fabric will distort when cut from the loom; Connie Lippert and Alex Friedman  use this technique to great advantage.

This consistency from loom to  finished cloth does not, however, translate to the balanced plain weave fabric I've been creating for the last few months.

 My experiments thus far have not been exactly scientific, of course, so everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.  Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even call them experiments -- more quiet meandering explorations-- but each each thing I try has taught me something, shifted a pre-conceived idea, or  led me to slightly alter my direction, and that is always interesting.

 Last week I wrote about spinning wool singles for this cloth, and promised to talk about sizing this week.  I had hoped to do some experiments with flour paste between then and now, but didn't get around to it so can still only speak to xanthan gum and gelatin.  Starch, too, awaits future experiments. But here's what I know so far.

xanthan gum left; gelatin right

The comic above shows the basic procedure: total immersion of clean damp yarn in one solution or the other, followed by weighed  hanging until dry.

In this phase, I much preferred the gelatin.  It dissolved easily in a small amount of cool water, then became nicely liquid when further diluted with hot. I immersed the skeins, squeezed the solution through, then hung them to drip.
note:  I'd used gelatin before, immersing dry rather than damp yarn; this time i found, unsurprisingly, that the yarn absorbed less gelatin solution. More on this later.

The Xanthan gum (I used the recipe in Sarah Anderson's wonderful book, A Spinner's Guide to Yarn Design was not so straightforward. It probably would have been easier  if I had followed Sarah's recommendation to use a blender to mix the Xanthan gum with the water though. Not having a blender, I tried a whisk and ended up with a gloppy, lumpy solution a bit like egg drop soup. I finally pushed it through a sieve which got rid of some of the lumps, but the consistency (which Sarah had described), continued to be, well, gloppy.
This meant that it needed to be worked into the yarn with more vigor than the gelatin and, once hung, that it took forever to dry.  It also meant that it didn't pool in the yarn as much as as the gelatin, which is  a plus (I had to turn the gelatin skeins more often.) 

Given the consistency of the xanthan gum, I expected that once they were dry the strands would be glued to one another and hard to wind into balls. This turned out not to be a problem.  Indeed, the yarn seemed less stiff and 'lineny' than the strands sized with gelatin.
This stiffness is something I'd liked with earlier gelatin experiments as it made the yarn easy to manage, especially when threading heddles, so I was a little disappointed by the lack of stiffness in the xanthan gum skeins.  Perhaps I needed to spend more time working it into the yarn?
Or perhaps it would be possible to warm up the xanthan gum slightly and make it more liquid which might make it go more easily into the yarn? I don't really know what it is though, so maybe heat will make it do something else entirely. I'm a big fan of gluten (my husband and son are bakers), so  don't have much call for such things to hold my bread together.  Anyone know anything about this? 

I also found the gelatin sized yarn less stiff than with the earlier gelatin experiments when I had immersed dry yarn into the solution. Next time: Dry yarn.

In the actual weaving, there was not much difference.  I did have a broken warp with one of the the brown xanthan gum sized pieces, but I believe that had more to do with a careless join in the spinning phase than any particular failure of the sizing.  Of course if I had used gelatin on dry yarn, it might have held together a little better, but I can't do the experiment on that particular strand of yarn, so that is only speculation.

Today I'm weaving with leftovers.  The warp is unsized wool (3" staple suffolk X), the weft a motley collection of sized and unsized singles. In all of them it is the twist/ grist relationship that makes the difference -- also that that the sett is appropriate to the yarn.
In short: sizing can be helpful, but the yarn needs to be up to the task.

Gosh, it always comes back to yarn, doesn't it?