Twenty past ten on Tuesday morning, the broken-weft stop on loom 5 tripped. It stopped at pick 320, six centimetres short of the start of the next repeat.
A broken pick is not itself unusual; there are a few every day. What mattered was where it landed. Inside a repeat the join is buried under a float and disappears. Near a repeat boundary, where the interlacements crowd together, the join has nothing to hide under and stands proud. This one was just short of the boundary.
Unwove it. Six centimetres came back out and the piece was restarted from the end of the previous repeat. That is faster than joining — a join takes three or four attempts before it disappears, and unweaving takes twenty minutes flat.
The test the older weavers use is the back of the hand: sweep it across the finished join, and if you can feel it, do it again. Fingertips are no good, they are too blunt.
We tried. Automatic knotters are fine on plain weave and show badly on satin, where the face is nothing but long floats and any knot is sitting out in the open with nothing over it. So on the looms running satin the joins are still made by hand.
Bring a swatch, a drawing, or just a sentence — "it should drape without going soft" is enough to start. We work backwards from yarn count. Minimum run 30 metres.