Diadem scarves

I recently finished weaving a batch of six scarves from knitpicks diadem: 50% Baby Alpaca, 50% Mulberry Silk. They feel beautiful, but were a bit of a pain to weave as the yarn isn’t all that sturdy, so I had to be fairly careful to not abrade the yarn too much and break it. Five of the scarves were all the same basic twill, just with different colored wefts, while the final scarf (the pink one) I did with a tabby shot, allowing me to weave lozenges instead of diamonds. I’m really pleased with the result-they feel (and look) lovely. I don’t seem to have taken any finished pictures, so here are some in progress shots of the three I did remember to take pictures of:

White wool blanket

I made this blanket as a gift for some friends. They saved some fur from their dog, and I then spun it into a yarn, and used that yarn as an interest yarn in a blanket.

The dog hair was fairly short, and not super soft. I decided that it would do well as an occasional yarn in a larger project, and that a wool lap blanket would be nice. That way I could use a softer wool for the majority of the blanket, but the dog hair could still be part of it.

In spinning the yarn I had several considerations. Mainly I wanted to make sure that my yarn didn’t shed. I also wanted to use some angora bunny fur to help with the softness. What I ended up doing was to spin two medium/fine singles of dog and a single of angora, both with a Z twist. I also spun a medium/thick (all on my scale of such things, and keep in mind that I typically spin for lace projects) S twist single of shetland wool. Each of the Z twist singles were overplied against a thread (S twist), and then those three single+thread combinations were plied (Z twist) along with the wool. The plan is that the finer single and thread will help to bind the dog and angora into the yarn, so that the yarn doesn’t shed, while the wool helped to provide some bulk and elasticity. I’m really pleased with how the yarn turned out, and I really like how it looks. I’m planning on doing this again, only with two strands of bunny (and no dog) for interest yarns in other projects. This time I used a light blue thread to ply the bunny against, and next time I think I’ll mix that aspect up with more/brighter colors. If you look carefully you can see the blue occasionally in the pictures of the yarn below.

The yarn turned out to be a heavy worsted weight.

After spinning the yarn, I then travelled home to use my mother’s 8 shaft floor loom. I wanted a good sized blanket, and I’d never done double weave before, so I decided that this was a good excuse to learn a new technique. Using my mom’s 8 shaft (instead of my own 4 shaft) allowed me to still do a twill (plus I don’t own a reed with a low enough number of dents per inch). I filled out the blanket with some Leicester Longwool from Seven Sister’s farm, a big spool of wool my mom picked up in Ireland while we were on a family trip (it was super cheap and pretty looking, though I’m glad I didn’t use it as the warp all by itself as it also was not very strong, as it turns out), along with a wool cotton blend from the Green Mountain Spinnery (the grey you see is their yarn, and there is also some white of theirs in the blanket as well).

Double weave, the way I did it, means that for a weaving width of 10 inches the final blanket ends up being 20 inches, i.e. I wove two layers at once. I chose to do a twill because twills drape better than tabby. At each dog and grey yarn I changed the direction of the twill in the warp, so that I could weave zig-zags instead of diagonals. If I’d been really ambitious I would have woven diamonds, but I decided that a double weave twill was complicated enough, particularly since I was working under some time pressure in that I wanted to get the blanket woven in a single visit to the folks.

The pattern ended up being a dog interest yarn, then 6 strands of alternating longwool and unknown irish wool, followed by a strand of the cotton/wool blend, then five strands of alternating longwool and irish wool, followed by two strands (treated as one) of grey cotton/wool blend. Mirror that and repeat for around 20 repeats, and that was the warp. Ideally the weft followed that pattern as well, but I did have some trouble at times keeping all those yarns straight for the weft.

The finished blanket is around 2 yards by 2 yards, and has lovely twisted fringe (not pictured here, as these pictures were all from before we got in the car to drive to the airport to go back home, and the fringe was twisted on the drive). I am very pleased with how it turned out. The fold was not as obvious as it could have been, and I think with a washing it will start to disappear. I don’t think my mistakes or lack of consistency in beating are at all obvious, and it is a nice weight lap blanket, big enough for two people. I also got it woven (winding the warp to taking it off the loom) in less than one week!