Think of it as a really wide scarf... [MFM]

I'd hoped to get a review of warp #7 done for today but I spent the weekend doing other things, like spending Easter with the fambly, hunting for chocolate eggs with our 4 year old niece, working on a really big yarn order, and weaving a blanket off of the big loom. I was going to post the blanket to HFD and talk about the yarn order here but, you know, there's not really much to say about it and there certainly aren't any pretty pictures to go with it. So, in the spirit of Mixed Fibre Mondays, here is der blanket instead!



This is a custom order for a customer who wanted a wool blanket in the same general colour scheme as a cotton and acrylic blanket I made for her last year; those up there are the colours we settled on. As I described ages ago on HFD, I sampled them in Photoshop so that I could match the colours pretty exactly in Fibreworks PCW and work out some stripes. I was using up stash on these blankets so had to fiddle the stripes a bit while winding on, but the warp looked pretty much like this:


Turns out, though, that the dark green and the blue are much more similar than the sampled colours led me to believe, so those stripes look like a mostly solid colour with something just a little funky going on. This was disappointing so I've been dragging my heels a bit with the weaving. Now that the blanket's off the loom and I can see the whole thing, I'm much happier with it than I thought I'd be so now I'm keen to do the next two and see what happens with them! :D

Still, those stripes need some work:


As I was weaving, I toyed with various options for dealing with them and decided to needle weave in some accent stripes between the blue and the green. This should both break up the wide dark stripes and call attention to the colour shift. I quite like adding some embellishments to a blanket once it's off the loom - a bit of cross stitch here, a running stitch there. Partly it's just fun and I like the extra unexpected pop of colour but it also frees me up to throw in weft stripes willy nilly without worrying toooooo much if they're a good width or in a good spot: if they turn out to be strangely balanced, I can always rebalance things with some surface embellishing after the fact.

I've only gotten a few ends woven through so far (those chocolate eggs won't find themselves, after all!):


I still haven't settled on how many ends to weave through but I think the general idea is going to work. What you see there is only one yellow "end" woven through; I'm going to try two or three to mimic the weight of the basket weave stripes in the weft and see which I like best. I might also try using the light green from the pic of the yarn on spools above since that didn't actually make it into the blanket in the end.

I'll keep you posted on how it turns out!¹


1. Ha! A pune (or play on words)!²

2. That'd be a Carrotism, right there. Or is it an Oggism? Both, perhaps, since Carrot and Nanny are both from the Ramtops... Ahem. Anyone else a huge fan of Terry Prachett's Discworld novels? If so, you'll love my nephew Jake's 13th birthday cake!