This one was a little bit special. The recipient is allergic to wool, so my usual 75% wool 25% acrylic yarn from Turkey wasn’t going to cut it, and the 50% wool 50% alpaca wasn’t exactly it either.
I had already made one scarf from 100% acrylic, and that was a possibility. But I didn’t like the feel of it and the washing/drying of it as much as I did the wool blends.
At The Woolery the excellent staff introduced me to some special yarn from Japan. It is 40% cotton, 30% silk, and 30% viscose (a rayon produced from bamboo). I really liked the available colors and the texture felt great.
The Woolery folk warned me that this yarn was not nearly as strong in tensile strength as wool blends. They told me why this was so in technical terms which I immediately forgot. I had to be careful when pulling it while measuring, and when keeping it taut as I wound it onto the warp beam. Sure enough, I broke it a couple of times before I learned, proving that I am only somewhat trainable. Once woven into a scarf, the material is plenty strong enough.
Because the loom was kept relatively loose, this particular project went a little more slowly than others, as I had to re-learn the feel for a good weft, and generally pay more attention on each pass. This is exactly the kind of experience I wanted – to see how differing something changes the way that you weave. My plan is to be able to weave using many different materials, and this is a good introduction to that variety.
Here’s the yarn being draped around the distant peg for measuring. You almost can’t see the lavender stripes along the bottom third.
Here’s a view before pulling every other strand through a heddle hole. If you compare this to some other similar pics for other scarves, you’ll see that this yarn is a little bit thinner than what I’ve been working with up to now.
Here’s a pic of just starting to weave. At night I had several spot lamps trained on the work to see what I was doing.
And now the weaving part is done, and what remains is to take it off the loom and tie it off at each end.
This is another view of the weaving part being done. The take-up beam is full of scarf.
The final product, ready for trimming. It turned out that washing in hot water and drying had a similar effect on this material as it did on the wool blends, so that was good.
Here’s another shot at the final product. With even slightly different lighting the colors look different.
And here is a little shot of my factory floor, tee hee. You wouldn’t know it but those who know me know that this level of clutter would normally be bothersome for me. Somehow, while making scarves, it didn’t bother me at all.
