Weaving for Me

I’m waiting for a few moms to make decisions on the colors for their baby wraps. I’m taking the down time between wraps to weave for me – or rather to weave things I think I need for my upcoming shows — one this coming weekend and one the last weekend in August.

You already saw the red-to-orange-to-yellow silk shawls and the blue silk shawl. You haven’t yet seen the 2 other silk shawls – they’ve now been fringed & wet finished but are still awaiting pressing.

I want to bead the fringe of at least one of those shawls if I can make the time, but I haven’t even decided which one(s) yet. My beads may dictate that decision.

Meanwhile I tried something. Sandra Rude encouraged me to use my luscious tram silk as warp in combination with something else. I wanted to see how it would work with the fine gauge cashmere-silk blend yarn I have on hand (7,250 yards per pound).

I wasn’t positive it would work as well in real life as it did in my mind, so I decided to only warp for 2 scarves, not my usual 3. I used one strand of the cashmere-silk in burgundy and 2 strands of the tram silk (30,000 yards per pound) in burnt orange. I thought these colors would work well together, and that the shininess of the silk would play off the matte finish of the cashmere-silk blend.

Measuring, beaming, and threading the loom went pretty well. No real problems.

Then I had to wind a bobbin with the 3 threads – 1 of cashmere-silk and 2 of tram silk. It’s a bit of a challenge to make 3 threads be exactly the same tension when winding a bobbin, but it worked reasonably well.

On to weaving. I’m using a Swedish lace block pattern I’ve used before. I do love weaving lace. It makes me happy.

I think in this photo you can see the interplay of the threads. The silk is not only a bit lighter in color, its shininess is really what the camera is catching. I just loved it. It reminded me of the end of a campfire, when the logs are mostly burned down and all that’s left are a strongly-glowing coals in colors of red and orange.

I wet finished and pressed, and only then found a few treadling errors, so I’ll have to fix them and then wet finish again, but it won’t take long – these things dry in a heartbeat.

From a distance of even a foot or two you see one color, but when you get closer you can see the depth in the scarf, the marriage of light and dark, shiny and matte.

I’m betting these scarves sell well. Even though I know from experience that what I think will sell and what actually sells are often very different. We’ll see.

I just got three more tencel scarves on the loom, and need to go mow some lawn before it gets too warm, even though the grass is surely still very wet from all of our recent rain. I plan to get the 2 smaller sections of my lawn mowed today, the larger section will need more time to dry out. But I gotta keep it looking good for the teaming hordes coming to view and give me offers on my house. (Can you hear the sarcasm there? When you live in the sticks in a poor county, selling takes time. Sigh.)