Wool For Brains

I didn’t go to Woolfest this year, it’s too far for the day and a weekend away was a bit silly when we were away on holiday again six weeks afterwards. The attraction of the event is the people, the inspiration and the shopping opportunities. Well I’m not a people person and would walk past people I “know” on the internet without introducing myself, I can see pretty photos of exciting colourways all over the internet and I’m a boring shopper. I would have bought the same as the last two years, a kilo of superwash bfl and a shetland fleece and that’s not much of a haul for all that travel.

My stay at home haul was much bigger and more exciting than anything I would have bought in person. This involved no travel at all because it came to me in the post in a really big sack the week before Woolfest. It looks like a wall of wool but appearances can be deceptive, the majority of it is silk. There’s camel, cashmere and orlon, a tussah brick, a mulberry brick, silk noil, throwster’s waste, cotton, angora, some mohair and alpaca but no wool (not other than mixed with silk or cashmere). It was a surprise parcel in that I didn’t know what was in it (”mostly exotics”) but as I was only paying the postage it seemed worth the gamble. Some days you just get lucky.

It was all natural colours but I’ve been working on that. The samples I spun as they were, there was under 20g of each so that didn’t take long. The top skein is flax/silk, I can’t think of any use for such a blend and I’m no wiser now that I’ve spun it. The dark one was cashmere/merino/silk, then tussah and 50/50 merino tussah. The dayglo orange is a silk cap (like a hankie but formed into a different shape), the bits at the bottom are silk noil and will make lumps in batts, the sea of green at the top is a tussah silk brick. There was some cotton and flax too, the bulk of the flax has been rehomed but I kept the cotton because I’ve not spun that before. I still haven’t spun it because I can’t think of a use for the yarn and I have more exciting things lined up to spin.

I got the pile under control by making it into smaller piles. All the silk (and there was a lot of silk) went into the newly created silk bag, the protein-but-not-silk went into a bag for dyeing but the odd stuff is still roaming the front bedroom looking for a permanent home. My plan for sorting it out was derailed by having the drive band on the carder break off, I still haven’t got that replaced. That was the same weekend I decided to take out the slack on the stretched stretchy drive band on the spinning wheel. That didn’t go well, I’ve joined one before with no trouble but this one would not fuse. After four failed attempts I was worried that it would be too short to do anything with if I failed again and I went for the desperate measure of sewing it together. It’s not ideal but the first join lasted for seven bobbins of single and three bobbins of plied yarn which in my book is better than not having a working wheel at all.

(You would be correct in deducing that I have no knitting – I’m in week two of recovery from a knitting related injury and I’m hopeful that normal service will resume shortly)

I’ve not eliminated the pile of wips but good enough will do. I managed to get the four small bobbins into one big skein, 1400 yards of skinnyish polworth. The bottom braid was dyed in beautiful British Columbia and came to me from a swap on Ravelry. I had plans for something huge and lacey, changing colour along its length. Unless I concentrate my standard skinny yarn runs around 700 yard/100g and that isn’t going to knit up huge. I got an undyed braid from the same person in a later swap, dyed that in vaguely similar colours with the aim of plying the two together to double the yardage.

I also finished up the baby jacket. This is Phazelia’s mitered baby jacket again with the same level bottom mods as last time. With this one I knitted the body before the sleeves thereby committing myself to knitting the sleeves in the round. The one good point about that is that when you reach the bottom of the sleeve you need to work each side seperately when knitting flat and if it’s in the round you don’t. Should I knit another I’d knit it flat because I dislike purling on dpns even more than sewing a seam. I think I’m done with these now, two was enough.

I did slack off on Sunday and play with some silk with the able assistance of my son. We made three pieces of silk paper (aka silk fusion), two of which I let dry flat for another day’s play. This is basically papier mache using silk fibre and glue (I do have photos of the process if anyone is interested). I haven’t tried it yet but it’s supposed to soften again when wet so it can be shaped at a later date. The third piece, in teacher’s favourite colour, is now a pen pot for her desk. The jam jar gives it some stability because otherwise there is no weight to it at all. There will be some more of this coming along because I have 200g of throwster’s waste to get rid of somehow and I’m not planning on spinning it.

The last piece of knitting in the pile (socks don’t count) was the toddler sundress. This is now in time out because although I’ve thrown lots of knitting time at it it is still many inches short. It’s not done but I am. If it hadn’t been in stripes I would have ripped it by now just to see it gone but I’ve plodded on (and on and on). It will lose 20% of the length in the first wash so although it looks a good length already it isn’t really. It is now going in a bag under the stairs for a month while I try to forget what it is I dislike about it.

I am now going to cast on for something fun. I’ve been a good girl and worked hard on the work in progress this week but I’m over it now.

After I’d trawled out the various bits and pieces of work in progress I decided to work hard on reducing the numbers. Every knitter has their own views on what constitutes an acceptable level of work in progress, it varies from one person to another but the number that they feel happy with is the right number for them. For me, at least this week, that heap is too big. It’s not just about the numbers either, I know that the reason that some of those things are not finished is because they are stuck. I need to decide whether the sock needs a toe and as that is not knitting it’s not happening. The blanket needs some sort of edging and I can’t decide what. The baby jacket ran out of interesting yarn way too early and the sundress is just no fun. If I cast on for something else then they will linger longer so I’ve put the silk out of sight for now. I decided to chip away at it, one win a day and by focussing on what I have already started I might take my mind off the silk.

Day one of the new wiploss programme (Tuesday) was a clear success by anyone’s standards. I measured the length of fabric, cut it into three and sewed it back together again. The reason it had been sitting about was that I couldn’t decide how to finish the edges, satin binding, candy cane binding, something with prairie points? In the end I did none of those and just hemmed the ends, leaving the sides as they were. I’ve pressed it, sewed the ends in from stitching the seams and it’s as done as a baby blanket needs to be. Final measurements were 36″ by 31″ wide, it’s a scrap sock yarn warp with superwash laceweight weft. It’s a clasped weft which means that it’s doubled and the doubled laceweight is just about the same weight as sock yarn. I used the 12.5 dpi reed, I started off with the 10 but it didn’t look right. It’s just as well that it came out narrower than I’d planned because otherwise it would have been huge.

Day two – there was measureable progress in that I filled a third bobbin with green polworth. The rest will fit on the very last bobbin and then I’ll have a massive plying session. I had this set aside for a Tour de Fleece project but I’m not much of a joiner and I’d filled the first bobbin on the Friday before the start. I watch the cycling every day and I spin most days but that’s as far as it goes

Day three – one sock down, one to go. This has been sitting on hold for a week because I needed to make the decision of whether to start the toe and that seemed to be too taxing in an evening. I spent five minutes during the day doing the measuring and then that got me past the stage that I was stuck on. The second sock is always easier because all I have to do is make it match the first, no thinking about “is the cuff long enough?”, “what heel should I make?”, “is it time for the toe yet?” just match and knit.

Day four (Friday) – The last bobbin of Polworth is done. I’ve gone right off green which is a bit of a shame because I have 8oz of it to ply now and by the time I’ve finished that I imagine that knitting it would be out of the question. I don’t really feel like plying it but it’s filling four bobbins and I don’t feel like winding it off for storage either.

That seems to be the right place to stop because if I continue I think I’ll be looking at a fail for day five. If I give myself the weekend off then there’s a chance that something might be finished by Monday but there’s no realistic chance of a win for tomorrow.

So what happened in a week? I was wondering what I should blog about and why it is that it’s been a week and yet I have surprisingly little to show. I looked at my last post and there was a clue in the pink silk. I stopped spinning when I’d had enough of it, 752 yards, 68g (I’m back to the international scale measure of the Tictac). This looks more purple than the pink fluff in my last post, that’s because when I came to set the twist I added a bit of purple dye to darken it. It’s my current favourite thing, I love it to the extent that I’m prepared to overlook that I don’t like knitting silk and I keep eyeing it up for a little shawl thing.

This is the other reason why I have nothing to show, it looks as if I had a quick burst of startitis somewhere along the line. The pink silk counts as finished but everything else is sitting around the halfway mark. The weaving needs cutting into three and sewing back together again, there’s a baby jacket that is stuck on the sleeves because my favourite yarn ran out, a toddler’s sundress that is going on and on without end and two bobbins of green that are waiting to meet the other two bobbins that I haven’t spun yet. There’s a lot of activity but not much output. I am telling myself that if I just focus then something will get done but what I want to do is ignore the rest and play with the silk.

I took some books out from the library this week because I clearly have nothing else to be doing in the evenings other than reading. It’s only a small village library but of late  the craft section has produced a few pearls, my prize this week was “Freeform Style”. We will overlook that it’s decades since I used a crochet hook for anything other than a provisional cast on or adding beads to knitting, I used to be able to do it and I’m sure it would come back to me. The project that caught my eye was the one on the cover, the big red wrap. There is no way I’d ever make it as written, it starts off by knitting a square rectangle 40″ wide and 48″ long and then fulling it to around a yard square and that is never going to happen. It would work with woven yardage, full it, cut it apart and then add wide pieces of crochet insertion to make a hybrid item that is much bigger than the fabric you started with. I suppose I really ought to start with a sample before leaping into major yardage which leaves me with the question of where do I keep the crochet hooks?

There were no more worms this week, no worm houses or worm workwear. I’m glad about that but I don’t think I’m off the hook yet. We’re now on a James Bond theme (the name is Link, Worms Link) and this is Mr Link finally tracking down the archvillan Goldenworm. The narration for this page runs along the lines of “and Worms says “I have you now, Goldenworm” and Goldenworm, disguised in his green knitted bodysuit says “Who’s Goldenworm?” ” My escape plan is to provide half a dozen drawing pads and hope for safety in numbers.

Things are progressing but in some cases it’s not at a rate you could easily measure. The big grey blob is bigger and just as grey. I decided that I was not going to think about the edging until I hit 200 stitches on a side and I’m now not that far away from that. I want to finish the border on a number of stitches that the edging fits nicely into. This means that I have to choose an edging sometime soon and then spend five minutes with a calculator and write down how I intend to ease the edging around the corners. It’s easier just to keep on knitting and work the details out later but I’m coming up on the stage where there isn’t any more later, it has to be now unless I want to knit a blanket in laceweight yarn.

The big grey blob is still my main knit but it won’t go in my handbag any more so I need a small project for out and about. These will be growing slowly because the only knitting time they’ll be getting is in odd minutes of waiting time snatched here and there. These are Confetti 100 cotton superwash (49% wool, 35% cotton, 16% nylon) all the way from Canada via a swap on Ravelry, hopefully they will make cool socks for summer. The beads are another tidy up, I had just 128 for each sock so that’s the end of those. They aren’t ideal but they are used up so that’s something.

From slow knitting to slow spinning. This is going to take a while because the spindle is living on the breakfast bar and I spin while I’m waiting for the pasta to finish or the kettle to boil. Like the sock it’s all done in odd minutes here and there so it will take a long time to work my way through the bag of angora. It will be uneven yarn when it is done because I don’t have a reference length that I’m aiming at but it will be yarn rather than fibre and used up is better than being in a bag. This might end up being a cabled four ply or there again it might not, when it’s done I’ll see what the majority of it looks like.

This was very much faster in the spinning. This is 116g of merino from Riverpoet (via a swap on Ravelry) that spun itself into 400 yards of two ply. I like it, it’s colours that I don’t dye and I even like the scary gold parts. I can’t decide whether to use it as warp or knit it and I might just stick it on Etsy while I think about it some more.

I like this one too, 96g and 746 yards of two ply icelandic, alpaca, bamboo, glitz, wool and cashmere from batts from a swap on Ravelry. I did originally think that I’d knit this into something lacey but I’m now thinking that it would be lovely as weft, the irregularity in the spinning will look better woven than knitted and it’s a good colour that will go with just about everything.

In case you are thinking that everything in my stash comes from swaps on Ravelry and that I’ve adopted the barter system for everything well, you’re nearly right. I did buy the angora though.

I’m not usually a joiner of things, I’ve never signed up for the Knitting Olympics or the Tour de Fleece. For some reason I was thinking of the latter for this year, just thinking you understand and well maybe dyeing a bit too. I thought I’d spin something plain and lacey and I dyed some Shetland with this in mind. It’s light in colour and not something that I’d usually dye.

This demonstrates why it is that I am not a joiner. I have a basic inability to follow someone else’s timetable. The Tour doesn’t start until the beginning of July but having dyed the wool I didn’t want to wait. I’d have been finished sooner except that I fell off a kerb on Saturday and had a day where I couldn’t treadle. I couldn’t walk either but that’s beside the point. I did consider putting these back through the wheel to add more twist because despite treadling like a deranged hamster running in its wheel there maybe wasn’t quite enough twist. In the end I didn’t do it, the next time my inner spinner suggests this perhaps I’ll listen.

The result is something skinny but not laceweight, it’s my standard three ply sock yarn made as a two ply. There’s just under 700 yards here and although it is exactly what I thought I wanted, light and nearly solid, it still might be hitting a dye bath. The fibre at the top of this post was not something I usually dye because it’s not something I’d normally knit with. It would have been better yarn with more twist in the single but it will do. I’m still not sure whether I’m going to sign up for the Tour de Fleece, I suspect that I’d be better waiting until the last minute.

Thank you for the lovely comments about the little flippy lace thing from last time. I would by now be half way through another but I’m still fully engaged with the big grey blob. This is it posing as big grey briefs, such an appealling thought. It started as a Kerry Blue but I’m just about to change to the border and edging from the Cobweb Crepe shawl in Heirloom Knitting. Once I’ve made that transition then I can stop thinking about it and just knit until it’s big enough. You can expect much whining and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the edging because it’s going to be a test of stamina.

These ought to make an appearance before they hit the sock drawer. This is definitely the last pair in this pattern, I’m bored with it now. The yarn is Zitron Trekking Pro Natura which is 75% wool and 25% bamboo rayon. I liked the colours in this and thought that it would make good summer socks but I don’t think that I’d buy it again (not that I bought this because it was a swapsie). I was picking out tufts of bamboo while I was knitting. I’m probably influenced against it because of the two knots in the second sock. If they’d been in the first sock then I wouldn’t have remembered them but the second sock is still fresh in my mind.

The blog is now fixed and shouldn’t be vanishing any more. There was a sound technical reason for it that went right over my head involving something failing memory tests. I fail mine all of the time so maybe it is catching. Next time could be the return of the big grey blob, teatowels – where I went wrong, or maybe we’ll look at the spindle and two balls of yarn that I’ve just rehomed from Ravelry.

Is this a clue as to the colour of the moment? (shop stock)

How about this? (also shop stock)

This week everything is green. This will be the next project on the loom, three greens, one is 20% green carded with white shetland, one is 60% green with white shetland and one that was green all on its own (easier than it sounds, each is 50g with one part green, three parts green, five parts green). If I’d had this idea to start with then I would have carded the green too, as it was I’d spun that before I thought of the shading so the darker yarn will stripe. I have to decide whether I dislike the thought of this enough to card up another 50g of the green and spin it. This depends on how picky I am (we know I’m going to card and spin some more, don’t we?) With this I will sample first because I have a clear idea in my head of what the fabric should look like. This means that the real fabric has a good chance of being Wrong because I’ve a definite idea of what Right looks like.

It will be no surprise to find that the last piece off the loom also featured green. The warp came from a quick trawl through the bag of sock yarn leftovers. I don’t want to talk about the sock yarn odd bits bag mostly because it’s currently residing in three bags, it really should be four bags because the three are overflowing. The first yarn I picked was the edge colour from the mitred square baby jacket, the rest were chosen to go with that one. The green stripes at the edges are the leftovers from Dan’s Tannenbaum hat and the luminous green accent is some of the leftovers from the Margarita Tsocks. The weft was the shiny twinkly flapper yarn from here, I knew there would be the ideal project for this in time, one where it just had to laze around and look wonderful. I’ve made a solid blue stripe in the centre, I’m planning on cutting it down this stripe and sandwiching it back together with a narrow piece of fabric that I haven’t made yet. If there turns out to be not enough of the eye catching lime then it will be onto plan B just as soon as I work out what that is.

It has been a change from purple but I can’t see that green is going to divert me from it in the way that the red/orange combination did. It’s been a pleasant diversion but I can’t see the green phase lasting for that long.

These are all over 80″ long and between 11 and 14″ wide. Together they weigh over 700g so in the last two weeks I’ve used a pile of yarn roughly the size of seven balls of sock yarn. It’s not a lot but it was enough. The big bag of wool is still full but now it’s full of the stuff that was previously in little bags all over the floor. The spare bedroom looks so much better now that I can see the floor again. I’m right at the start of another long piece, that one should see the last of the pink/violet yarns and then I can ram the leftovers in the big black bag and ignore it for another few months. You can see that the end is in sight, this was the last of the three pieces that I made and the weft here alternates two yarns, one thick and one thin. I like the effect even though I was driven to it because I didn’t have enough of either yarn.

There were two silk braids but the one on the left is presumably stuck in a big pile of post at an airport waiting for a plane. My edges are still pants but I enjoyed making them and watching the colours change. The darker silk is the yarn that was formerly Iris, there is still a lot of it left but much less than there was. I think the next couple will have the light pink as the main colour because that’s the one that I now have the most of. I know that it’s making no real impression on leftover yarn but I’m enjoying something that was previously stuck in a bag so it is still a positive move. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve spun some more silk so I can make braids in colours other than pinks. That makes no sense at all seeing as what I’m supposed to be doing is using up not making more.

There was also knitting, the Diamond Fantasy is now at the stage where the rows seem awfully long. I have been knitting two repeats a day but now I’ve dropped down to one (ten rows). It’s very close to being finished, or rather being close to the icord bind off that goes on forever. I’ve knitted this before and I remember how long it took me last time.

The reason I’ve had time to sit and weave despite it being school holidays is that this holiday turned out to be Airfix fortnight. I sit at one side of the dining table weaving while Dan sits at the other side building Spitfires. At the start of the holidays I was needed for getting the tops off the enamel paints and opening the childproof cap on the varnish. Through the week my workload dropped to being the colour consultant and wing pusher innerer and then by the end of the second week I was redundant. (The photo was taken by the model builder who doesn’t see past the planes at the front. Please try to follow his lead and ignore the general clutter, Easter eggs and dog treats)

Sewing can’t be done on the dining table so this is the only new bag I have to show. This one will be going in the post tomorrow so with the fabric that I wove that probably puts my use of fabric on minus eleven this week. I’m not even pretending that I can catch that up next week but sooner or later I will do.

No knitting to show today, next time I should have two pairs of socks to show and maybe some lace as well but today is all about finished objects of a different kind.

The last time we saw this photo was at the end of April last year. At the time I said “This one isn’t in the drawer at all, it’s waiting for me to get the scissors and make it into something, I keep putting it off in case I get it wrong and wreck my precious fabric. Hopefully the next time we see this it will have been transformed, either that or we will not speak of it again”. I certainly didn’t imagine that it would be eleven months for the transformation to take place. This is a pattern that weavers call log cabin. I spent a long while as a quilter and from that perspective log cabin is a totally different beast, this pattern in quilting is rail fence except that the colour placement is all wrong. We will not quibble over names, what it is is something that looks fiendishly difficult but isn’t. It’s the old impact to effort ratio in action again. The brown is Opal sock yarn and the green is blue faced leicester that I dyed with some leftover dye. The yellow wasn’t entirely dissolved and it made a slightly variegated green-yellow green roving.

This was planned from the start for a specific purpose. David bought himself a new laptop and asked for a slip cover to stop it from getting scratched while in his workbag. The critical thing was that the fabric finished up 10″ wide so I could join two pieces at the edges, any smaller and it wouldn’t fit, any bigger and it would be too floppy around the laptop.  I planned it very carefully and ended up with a fabric that was about one inch too narrow. That’s the real reason that it’s been sidelined for so long, there was no chance that the fabric would grow or the laptop shrink but I hoped that given enough time I’d come up with some sort of a solution.

In the time since I put this on one side I’ve cut up and sewn different bits of fabric that I’ve woven and although I’ve a lot to learn I am getting better at it. I’ve got the answer to handles now – cotton fabric over scraps of batting gives a nice firm feel and although the inkle straps were pretty these are an easier solution.  I”m not frightened of cutting into the handwoven stuff any more, it doesn’t start unraveling as soon as you cut into it in the same way as a dropped stitch doesn’t run all by itself. Wool is naturally sticky, if you want it to move then you have to pull it. If you don’t pull it until you’ve got it stabilised then it doesn’t unravel.

What I didn’t realise was that my log cabin fabric had something else wrong with it as well as that missing inch. I’d not beat it evenly over the length of the piece so the squares at the start aren’t the same height as those at the end. If I’d realised this I could have minimised the effect by joining two lengths cut from the same end but because it never occurred to me I did the worst thing I could have done and cut a length from each end. This meant that I was doomed, I had a seam that would never join well. (Remember, I make these mistakes so you don’t have to) There wasn’t enough fabric to cut another length so the dodgy seam has had to stay.

Rather than have an insert of one inch, I thought it would look better to make it wider and have it as more of a feature than an excuse. I made a 2″ (finished) insert for the front and had no inset at the back. This was a big mistake caused by me not wanting to waste the precious handwoven stuff. If it had been ordinary yardage I’d have made my 2″ insert front and back and cut off the excess at the sides. This would have made the sewing really straightforward. As it was I’d now made the front bigger than the back, left myself with a plain back that would wrap over into the flap and caused the non-matching centre back seam. You don’t notice that the fronts don’t match because of the inset whereas the back is rather obvious.

To get the insert on the flap I had to make the flap separately to the back and join it, all work that I could have saved myself if I’d just chopped a bit off the sides. Clearly I still have some way still to travel towards my goal of approaching woven fabric with scissors and the thought of “It’s just yardage”. It does have some inbuilt wonkiness, I lined the pattern up on the flap because the only reason that I offset it in the body was to have the back line up properly. That was before I realised that it wouldn’t line up even with glue and nails. My novel and never to be repeated construction for the flap means that it’s not on quite straight, by then I was happy that I’d found a way to get it on at all and was past caring.

Verdict – it’s fit for purpose, it’s padded well, the Mac fits in it and it’s not going to fall apart. More importantly it’s finished (apart from the purchase of no snag Velcro for the underside of the flap). If I could turn back time I’d run the stripe all the way around and either cut the excess off at the sides or lay a 2″ stripe over a 1″ gap. I still think that the wider stripe was the right decision but I’d not predicted what a mess it would get me into. If I could turn the clock back even further I’d not use a pattern with all those unforgiving lines or even better weave something that was the right width to start with.

Recently there was a discussion on Ravelry about setting the twist in handspun and it set me thinking as to whether there was any situation where I might not set the twist before using my handspun yarn. I thought about it while walking the dog and washing the pots and eventually thought of one possible case where I might go directly from bobbin to project. It would be woven (because I don’t think I’d like knitting with lively yarn) and it would need to be something that was going to be fulled so that any effects from finishing the yarn would be overshadowed by the finishing of the piece.

The thought hung around a while and I decided to make two scarves, I would say “identical scarves” but the idea of me ever making two things the same is laughable. I can do it with sweater parts but everything else is fraternal. I thought I’d make two the same but set the twist in the yarn for one and make the other with yarn straight from the bobbin. I was sure that I’d learn something along the way even if it was “always set the twist”. I did think this through first, I was using a singles yarn so there was no plying stage to take some of the twist out. I knew that it might be a bit lively but providing it was kept under tension it would be fine. I was indirect warping so the warp would be under tension there, I can slide the loom along to meet the warping peg so the warp would be under tension the whole time I was winding it onto the back beam. I could tension the bobbin while I was filling the shuttle – what could possibly go wrong?

For those of you who don’t watch much children’s television the phrase “what could possibly go wrong?” always precedes an unfortunate occurrence. When I was thinking through the process to see if this was a reasonable idea I’d managed to miss a step in warping. That would be the step right at the end where you need to release the tension and cut the ends of the warp loops before passing them through the reed. The photo shows what happened the instant the yarn was no longer under tension, at this point it was all still safe because although the yarn is all twisty there’s no way for that twist to escape. The next step was to cut the yarn loop to make two separate pieces, that was the step where there was a strong likelihood of them untwisting to the extent that the yarn fell apart. Yet again I was saved by the rubber faced clips, I cut the loops one at a time, put one end in the clip to stop it untwisting, passed the other through the heddle eye and then straight into the clip. It was not the most fun weaving experience I’ve ever had but fortunately there wasn’t much of it to do.

The second scarf took a day longer from start to finish because that’s how long a skein of yarn takes to dry at this time of year. I set the twist so the warping was less of a thrilling experience (will I drop the clip, will the yarn untwist and fall apart before I get the knots in) but the biggest benefit was in the weft which sat happily in the shed instead of writhing about.

It’s a handspun merino single in two colours, the merino was so soft that if you gave it a hard glance it would felt. I used the 10 dent heddle, threaded 10 ends dark, 10 ends air, 10 ends light and I wove it in the same pattern with card spacers between the sections. I rolled it around a plastic carrier bag with socks over it to hold it all together and ran it through the washer. I thought I’d lose 40% in shrinkeage, the finished length was 70″ and the starting warp length was 114″. It measured 13″ in the reed and finished to 8″ wide.

After fulling there’s nothing to chose between them, they look the same in every way. There were clear differences before shrinking, you can see that one of these is sitting there nicely and one is wriggling trying to escape from its captivity in the woven fabric. There are no prizes for guessing that the one on the left is the one that did not have the twist set.

So what have I learned? I love the absence of yarn handling that you get from using the stuff straight from a bobbin, it saves making a skein, soaking it, drying it and winding a ball. I still think that this will be the only circumstances in which I dare to do it though, I’ve seen yarn change drastically on finishing so many times that I’d worry about what that change would do to the final product. I was surprised to end up with two scarves the same given that they looked so different off the loom, I was convinced that the lively one would end badly. I already knew that you can use soft spun merino singles for warp on a rigid heddle loom because I’ve done it before. The big question has to be if I was making another scarf what would I do? I can answer that because I’m making one now and I’m going straight from the bobbin again.