Warp #7 review [MFM]

Wow, it's been more than a month since I reviewed Warp #6! How can that be!? Wooosh, how time flies. Fortunately, this time Lulu's wearing her spanky new LCD screen and all the colours are bright and beautiful. I even managed to fix up the weird shade of lavender that Lu and Bella were insisting on for Scarf #25 - though I did have to do that in Picasa 'cause even upstairs in natural light it wasn't coming out right. Thank goodness for Picasa's oh-so-easy photo editing tools!

You may recall that Warp #7 was where I started playing around with PPI to see what beat produced the nicest fabric. Having taken a wide survey of all my husband, we have determined that... there's not a whole lotta difference, all things considered. He did think that Scarf #23 (woven ~7 PPI) felt lighter than Scarf #22 (woven ~8) but found that #22 was smoother - whether that was due to beat, to the way I pressed it or to a difference in the spun weft is uncertain. My guess is the pressing - maybe I used more steam? Ron had no particular preference as to the weight but he did like the smoother scarf best.

In related news, I had been fussing a little bit about the weight of these scarves woven on 8/8 warps but I'm feeling very much relieved about it now. Jade-of-the-lovely-neck and her fab photographer husband came over to our place on Saturday so I took the chance to fling a variety of scarves around her neck. They all passed muster; in fact, she loved Scarf #3 so much I thought I was going to have to search her bags before they left. ;) The others were all very nice, she thought, but she deemed Scarf #3 perfect in all respects: colour, length, and in particular weight. She wore it for Some Time and petted it a lot.

This is a big relief to me, both because it means I haven't woven a bunch of scarves that are too heavy and because now I can go back to weaving on the big chunky warps I love to use without feeling like I'm wimping out somehow. Yay!

Here are the finished pics of Warp #7, which covered Scarves 22, 23, 24 and 25:



And here are the particulars:

Warp 7: 8/8 cotton set at 10 EPI, 70 ends hence 7" wide in the reed.

Scarf 22: 4/8 unmercerized cotton, 62" x 5.5"
Scarf 23: 4/8 unmercerized cotton, 71" x 5.5"
Scarf 24: two strands of 2/8 unmercerized cotton plied together, 45" x 5.5"
Scarf 25: 4/8 unmercerized cotton, 60" x 5.5"

As you can see in one of those pics, I tried twisting the short scarf into a mobius strip and then knotting the fringes from both ends together. I did not love this, so will probably undo it and try something else. I certainly hope Mom remembers to pack her thinking cap when she comes in less than two weeks!

Incidentally, I've started playing around with Flickr since it seems to get so much more attention than poor ol' Picasa does in online circles - and also because I've joined the #twitterweave group on Twitter which now has a Flickr group of its own. So far I've created a Scarf A Day set as well as sets for Warps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and the as-yet-unreviewed 8.