Friday, December 11, 2015

Beautiful Scarves

I got the box on it's way today.  I hope it gets to it's destination early next week.  Once I put all the scarves out and took some pictures, I was very pleased with them.

The first warp was four threads of each color.  I choose the lightest and darkest of the yarns to get a good contrast for the dornik twill.  The first scarf was four shots dark and four shots light to show the stars in the twill.  This is one of my favorite designs in weaving, but I don't like to weave it because you need to weave with two shuttles and that is slower to weave.  I keep both shuttles attached and just wrap the yarn around the non-weaving shuttle, so I do not have to cut weft as I weave.  The second and third scarves off this warp are in point twill instead of the broken twill for dornik.  With each of these I used a third color.  When I design these scarves on commission, I get a bunch of yarn in various colors and I need to design scarves that use those colors.  It's amazing how the gray colored yarn tended to look more blue when woven with the brown yarns.  I guess that is logical when you figure that blue and orange (brown comes from a dark orange) are complementary colors.  It is always so interesting in weaving to see how the colors look when they cross.
Three scarves from warp one
The warm brown in the second scarf and the cool gray in the third scarf complete the first warp.

To speed up the weaving I tied the second warp on the ends left on the loom from the first warp.  The second warp used the next largest ball of brown yarn and some contrasting stripes of gray.  This brown is very similar to the weft in the second scarf above.  The gray warp stripes make a nice contrast and I used a straight twill for the structure.  My loom was threaded eight shafts straight draw, so there are several possible tie-ups for getting different versions of the twills.
Two scarves from warp two
The weft for these scarves is the same yarns that I used in the warp.  I got one gray scarf and one light brown one.  You can see the twill line in the areas of the two scarves that have the mixed colors.  Twill does not show up as well when both the warp and weft are the same color.  I like twill for my scarves, it makes a nice fabric and these llama fiber scarves should be very warm.

On the last warp, I started winding for two scarves, but realized that I did not have enough yarn, so I re-did it for one scarf.  I had gone through all kinds of calculations to get stripes that matched the point twill pattern in the scarf, but I miscalculated.  The finished scarf, however, turned out well.  I like the way I did a double repeat of the pattern to get a zig-zag pattern and a diamond.
One scarf from warp three
Although the pattern really "read" a zig-zag line with a small diamond when it was on the loom, after washing and pressing, it just looks like a large diamond, still it is a good design.

When I finished the third warp, I checked what was left on the warp beam and found that I had about 44 inches of yarn left.  Not enough for a full scarf, but with some adjustments I ended up with a 3 inch wide warp that was 88 inches long.  I wove with the lightest color of yarn, because that was the largest ball I had left and it ended up with a subtle check pattern.  Unfortunately, I was so excited to get everything in the box and mailed today that I did not even get a photo of it.  That is a shame, it is a nice scarf.

The temperature was up in the 40's (F) again so all the snow is gone in the valley, but the mountains still looked dusted with white.  We will be getting more snow, probably, but not tomorrow.  I have a sale and a concert to go to tomorrow and I don't want to drive on snowy roads!

Detail picture of my advent tree, I made it over thirty years ago.




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