Serendipitous Plaids

 There are all sorts of multi coloured and varigated yarns available these days.   The selection that is available is a far cry from the brightly coloured or baby pastel short runs of colours which gave you colour pooling no matter what.   Lately, I've found all sorts of wonderful gradients and self-striping yarns which give large blocks of colours which can be incredibly beautiful.  However the yarns which give serendipitous plaids seem to be more difficult to find in our area.  At least affordable yarns at any rate.   

I picked up two skeins of this yarn on trip to the yarn store a few months ago.   It wasn't really the colours that I would usually be attracted to, but they were pretty and I thought they'd make a pretty scarf.    I loved weaving this scarf off as the  plaid patterning came up quite quickly.   It really felt like a bonus with this yarn.  It's soft and has a nice drape as well.

The yarn was really nice to work with too.    When weaving with a striping yarn like this, you wind the warp and dress the loom as you would normally.   For the weft though, in order to keep the colours in order and striping without any abrupt changes, it's best to wind a bobbin or shuttle length of weft off.   I wind a small cake of yarn on my ball winder.    I've also wound a ball by hand or put it onto a stick shuttle.   When you wind the weft straight off the skein, or cone, the beginning of the yarn becomes the end of that weft yarn.   If you wind it into a ball, and then re-wind onto your shuttle or bobbin, the start of the yarn is again at the start of your weaving.   Do this for every bobbin or shuttle and the yarn will stay in the

same order as it is in the skein.  This gives you even transitions - no abrupt colour changes, and keeps the patterning in order.  Effectively, you double wind your bobbins/shuttles.  It takes a little extra time, but not much, however it gives beautiful results.

Off the loom, with a finished length of 77 inches and width of 11 inches.  I twisted the fringes at a meeting in the park.  It really did turn out to be very pretty.