Scarves

The plague has run rampant through our family the past couple of weeks.   I imagine it's hit everyone in our area though as I was out looking for cold meds for a family member, and there was a crowd around the picked over packages on the shop shelf.  Luckily it seems to be on the end of it's tyranny and things are slowly getting back to normal.

Before the invasion of the plague virus upon our family, I wound two warps.   I was only going to wind one, but for some reason I thought I'd wound the first one incorrectly, so I wound a second one.    Now though, I'm not sure I was off so I'm going to have to count and measure everything in the first warp.   Neither here nor there though...  I tied on the second warp to part of the last tea towel project warp.   I wanted a plain twill and it was threaded 1,2,3,4 for a tabby so no issues there. 

It was easy to wind on.   I'm only doing 2 scarves with this yarn.  It's some large corporation blend of mainly man made fibres and a bit of glittery stuff.   The local store had a 40% off sale 2 days before Christmas. My aim was for yarn that I didn't have to order special, was easily available and something I'd not normally use.  Ideally, I was looking for something mohair like fluffy, but didn't find it.  Instead I got this varigated, slightly fuzzy blend.      I had picked up some black of a similar weight during a tent sale in the summer, for a crazy low price and thought it would work well for the weft.   

The black looked awful with the pale greys.   I wove about 15 rows and then stared at it for a day and a half.   I went back to the shop, picked up 2 skeins of same weight but more subdued colours, came home and unwove the black.    The black will look good with the other warp, which is bright colours but while this one looked okay with the strands being wound together, the contrast was too high for my liking.

The first scarf weft was a skein of varigated, muted blues running from white to a blue a bit deeper than the grey.    It was pretty amazing luck to have the white in the warp work well with the white in the weft, considering I hadn't noticed the white tucked inside the skein.   I wound the bobbins and then rewound them onto a second bobbin to try to keep the transitions from colour to colour smooth and in the same order of the skein.  Except for one bobbin, where there was a knot in the skein, with an abrupt colour change. Still it's so much nicer than the original black weft.    


 The second scarf is being woven with a solid grey which is quite similar to the grey on the warp.   But it has sequins!   The yarn is a little fussy to work with, and I was wearing a few sequins for the first little bit until I figured it out, but it's pretty fun.   The kitties are enjoying the project too, from playing with the dangling floating selvedge threads to "helping" me wind bobbins.   Yesterday one of them was going after the packing paper as it unwound on the back.   It created much excitment on my end as the loom weights bounced around while I tried to weave.  

The scarves aren't off the loom yet.   You'd think that something this narrow would be a faster weave, but  I'm sort of passing the shuttle back and forth, which seems to take the same time as throwing a shuttle for a larger project.   Still, it's not wool, while I'm rather surprised that I'm enjoying weaving with the man made fibres and cheap knitting yarn, the bonus is that the cats aren't actually interested in the woven fabric itself.  This means that no kitty has tried to sit or nap on it!   Yay!