Weaving News

The man from the nearby guild came over and picked up the loom on Thursday. He’d done his homework and found a post on Dawn McCarthy’s blog that told him the castle came off the sides of the loom pretty easily. It sure did, once you knew were to look and how to do it. So he fit the entire loom in his Jetta, no problem. I could have done it in my Yaris, had I known that. C’est la vie.

Before he left, I got him to help me carry my dining room table in off the porch.

You can still see all the boxes & bags of things piled around the edges of the room; it’ll take a while to put everything back in order. In fact, it won’t all go back where it was. But now at least I’ll have the space to sort through my multitude of beads and figure out the next batch of jewelry-making supplies that I’ll sell.

I was happy to get my room back, happy to see the Varpa go to someone who thinks he’ll love it. I hope he does. It deserves a great home. Again, no seller’s remorse; this was surely the right decision for me.

So I’ve been weaving like mad. You saw some rayon chenille on the loom in the last post. Here’s the finished scarf.

I tried something I’d seen online with the second scarf on the warp…weaving the beginning back into the end for a V.

I will definitely try this again, although probably not with rayon chenille. It has to be packed in so tightly and it’s too hard to get good tension & a good solid beat when you’re weaving that front end back in. Plus, I was supposed to put a twist into it to make it a bit easier to wear. I thought I had done so, but when I was finally done fringing it so I could get a good look at it without worrying that things would fall apart, I saw that there was no twist. Again, c’est la vie. It was a good experiment and first attempt at weaving an infinity scarf.

After this, I wove a warp of three denim tonal rayon chenille scarves. I’ve used this yarn several times before, and it’s always well received.

Then I made it back to some of Tammy’s hand painted bamboo-cotton yarn, and wove a warp of four scarves.

I wove two scarves with a solid rust Tammy dyed for me, one with the variegated copper yarn and one with a burgundy rayon. Not sure which one I like best.

Finally, just because I wasn’t busy enough, I went to my guild’s annual dye day and dyed three skeins of 20/2 silk I’d wound from a big cone I had. Two in marigolds and one in indigo. Here they are still very wet on the drying rack in my bathtub.

That blue was a very vivid peacock. Quite unusual for indigo. Perhaps it was because I was a goof and totally overmordanted the skeins before I got there.

Surprisingly, to me at least, once it was fully dry it was a completely average indigo color.

Whew! I guess that’s all that’s new for now.

I have 8 more scarves I’ve woven in the interim, all waiting to be fringed, wet finished, and pressed. I’ll share pix of them when they’re done.