Finishing Scarves and Other Tasks

Since you only got to see the drall scarves on the loom, I thought it would be nice to show you the finished scarves all at once. This way you can see the color differences between the three scarves and you also get to see how nicely they drape after wet finishing and pressing.

On the left is the periwinkle weft, dark jade in the middle, and turquoise on the right. I don’t know that I can choose a favorite among these three – I like them all in their own right. That’s uncommon for me – I usually know my favs right away.

At the end of my last post I mentioned that the gemtones stripes warp was a problem from beginning to end. Let me count the ways.

I knew I wanted to do an Ms & Ws weaving pattern – one of my fall back 4 harness favorites. So first I spent WAY too much time on my computer, trying to get close to the actual colors of my yarn in Fiberworks and then plan out that warp. How much of each warp color would I use and what order what I put them in. I finally got to a design I was happy with.

Then I went to the warping board to measure the threads out. As per my plan I started by winding 11 threads of navy, 11 threads of gold, and 33 threads of turquoise. And I couldn’t go forward. I hated it. The order of the gold & the navy really needed to be reversed. I tried to simply flip the colors while they were on the warping board, and that worked fine till I got to the cross, and then I couldn’t do it. So I ended up UNwinding the 55 threads I’d already wound and starting again.

The warp went on the loom like a rayon dream and threading went without a hitch.

I intended to do two scarves with a periwinkle weft (the scarf on the left), but a foot into the first scarf and I knew I wasn’t going to make two periwinkles. It wasn’t rich enough to bring out the best in the other colors. So I wove ‘samples’ of about a dozen picks each of several colors to see how they’d work – a few different reds, black, dark purple, and navy.

My absolute favorite was the royal purple, but I didn’t have much. I did all the math calculations and according to my scale and my math, I should have had just enough for one scarf. So I set about weaving scarf number two (in the middle) and did love it. Unfortunately, apparently because my scale isn’t very sensitive, I didn’t have anywhere near enough for my typical 72″ (finished length) scarf. As it turns out, my finished length on this is just 50″. Sigh.

So then I had to pick the third weft color. I went with navy, even though I didn’t want to use one of the warp colors. I’m happy with it.

Today was the day I set aside to do some nasty tasks that had been on my to-do list for weeks.

I spent the entire morning gathering all the rest of the information I needed for my income taxes. I thought I’d done the majority of the work a month ago and would have little left to do. Hah! Three hours later, I was finally done.

Then it was time to press and tag 11 scarves I’ve finished recently. Bad enough in and of itself, but in order to put them away I had to re-tag most of the scarves that were already boxes. (In an earlier post, I noted that I was rethinking my pricing.) Fortunately simply changing the price tags on those already tagged scarves really wasn’t bad at all – not as bad as thinking about it was.

And now two dreaded tasks are off my to-do list! YAY!! I get such a feeling of accomplishment from that. It’s really a great deal of the reason why I make lists. Ok, 50% of the reason, with the remainder being that I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached.

Et tu? Do you make lists? Why or why not?