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.

Kiss me (for 30 seconds), I'm Irish! [Scarf 25]

Hooboy, tonight's gonna have to be a quicky again as I'm feeling extra stressy about the morning and I think the only thing that's going to help is a good night's sleep. Not that there's anything too major happening tomorrow, just a couple of things that snuck up on me that I'm not prepared for: a birthday lunch with a friend who deserves a much nicer present than the batch of cookies she's destined to get, and my sewing class for which I was supposed to sew pockets and inseams that never got done. Whoops!

If I'd been on top of things I would have woven this warp off yesterday so that I could put on that blue, brown and green one for today. Clearly, I am not on top of things. :P And so today, in honour of St. Pat's, I present you with this lovely pink/orange/burgundy/lavender number. Hey, it's no stranger than the game of Valentine's dart-balls we played at my in-laws tonight between the annual St. Patrick's Day dinner and the annual St. Patrick's Day cake (complete with shamrock frosting, OF COURSE). The dartboard was a red and pink plush number with scoring regions that said things like "Massage with Oil," "Kiss for 30 Seconds" and "Heartthrob".¹ Good job my four year old niece was too busy throwing the balls to actually stop and read the target, eh wot? I honestly don't know where my in-laws come up with stuff like this! Truly, I hope that when I'm 80 like my MIL, I will spend my family holidays throwing small sticky balls at plush dartboards that read "Kiss with toes and fingertips touching."

St. Pat's purists in the crowd, do not fret: the Irish stew and the shamrock cake were traditional and were served on 40 year old leprechaun placemats AND the whole family was wearing green. (Although, in the case of Ron, the green took the form of enormous plush Cthulhu slippers. MY enormous plush Cthulhu slippers, which I brought for him to wear to make sure he felt properly Irish. You'd be surprised at how many of the items on that page I actually own. Scroll down a ways to find the slippers.)

So anyway, my scarf for the day:


Some might consider using lavender weft on this warp a bit of stretch colourwise but I've used various shades of purple on with oranges and reds before and been really happy with the results. This wasn't quite the same shade of purple, true, but I figured I'd give it a whirl and quite liked the result. :) I wove this one about 65” long and somewhere around 8 PPI, I think. Was in such a rush to get it done before St. Pat's dinner that I didn't stop to keep track!

Speaking of shades of purple, for some reason Bella and Lulu have conspired to make this purple look a lot more blue than it actually is. It's really more... light raisin? than lavender. Hopefully when the scarf is taken upstairs into proper natural light I'll be able to get a shot that shows the true colour.



There were a bunch of other things I meant to talk about today and questions I wanted to ask but now that it's late and I'm fretting over birthday cookies and sewing homework I'll save them for later. That being said, I do want to take a little time right away to give a big thanks to Sue for the Blog Love award, and to Peg for the Kreative Blogger award! Great minds think alike, it seems. I really appreciate the awards, ladies, and will get to work on my lists. :)


And yes, if you're wondering, I am Irish. :) Largely so, anyway, as the blue eyes, freckles and so-fair-it's-nearly-translucent skin demonstrate. Let the smooching commence!


1. Oh, hey, maybe I should name this palette Heartthrob rather than Pulse! Or Massage Oil? 30-second Smooch? Hmmmm...

Midnight Madness [Scarf 24]

Ever have one of those nights when you just can't seem to go to bed, never mind to sleep? When you stay up so late that you get too tired to go to sleep, and then you wind up doing really improbable things? That was me last night, which is why at 3:00 aye em I was suddenly inspired to do something I've thought about vaguely from time to time, mostly in the context of "Yeah, that's possible but I'm sure never going to do it..."

The "it" in question was taking two commercial yarns and plying them together to make a heavier one. Actually, I started first with four strands of 2/8, two cotton and two acrylic, and plied those together into an 8/8. I only did a little bit but it worked okay, so then I took two strands of 2/8, each of which was a colour that I thought would work well on Warp 7, and plied them into the ball of "4/8" you see above. I didn't want to overspin them too much so they're not plied together very tightly; even at that they still kink back on themselves. I'm hoping the overtwist might do something funky when the scarf is washed. :)

Turns out I didn't wind very much of it - I just decided around 4:00 that I was done for the night, thankyouverymuch, and skeined the little bit that I had. When I wound my miniskein into a ball this morning, it weight 19 grams. Not really enough for a scarf but I figured I'd just see how long it turned out. Answer is: 50" exactly. Too short for a scarf but kinda long for a scarflette, so now I'm thinking I might cut a piece off one end to make a little knot/wrapper out of and turn the rest into a scarflette of some description.

The length might've been shorter than I'd hoped for but I was pretty happy with the colour and even with the amount of twist in the weft once it was woven. :) It's just possible I might try this plying business again - but hopefully not in the middle of the night!

Here are the pics of my hand plied mini-scarf:

The plied yarn wound onto a pirn and the first bit of weaving. Can you see the two tone weft?

A close up of the two tone weft. Click the pic to see it Size Big.

The finished mini-scarf.

See you tomorrow for Guest Scarfa #2 by Margaret Thorson of Waldron Island, Washington!

Last minute im-pulse [Scarf 23]

These are the colours I considered for today's scarfa. Well, not that one on the far right - that's the weft in yesterday's scarfa, which is the woven bit in this pic. As you can see, yellow is still figuring strongly in my local colourscape, but in the end I went with the light pink on the left. I'm really happy I did, too; I might go with a yellow or gold or orange tomorrow but today I'm really loving that pink. It was a last minute addition to my most recent order and I sure am glad it snuck in there. I really must indulge these last minute impulses...

Okay, that clinches it. I've been trying to think of a good name for this colour palette and the thing that keeps coming to mind is "Pulse" 'cause, you know, all the reds and pinks and a bit of zip from the orange to get your heartbeat going... and now there's the impulse angle, too. Not only today's colour choice or the last minute order, but even the way I chucked my original blues/greens/browns plan and went with these hot pinks and oranges on the spur of the moment. Guess this one's going to be Pulse for sure. (I'd go with "Impulse" but somehow that sounds more like a perfume or an Axe body spray...)

By the way, I wove today's scarfa even looser than yesterday's, which itself was woven more loosely than the ones on the warp before it. Lately I've been aiming for about 9 PPI but I wove yesterday's scarf at 8 PPI (under tension) and today's at only 7. I did this because the last warp I wet finished woven on the 8/8 cotton was a bit firmer than the earlier ones and I want to determine whether that was because of a change in my beat or because of a change in the wet finishing method I've been using. I'll report on what I learn once I learn it!

Here are the pics from Scarfa #23:

My final colour choice. On the pirn, that is. The cloth here is still yesterday's scarfa #22.


Under way! I hemstitched this one (and scarfa #22) a little differently than earlier scarves, too - another experiment!


Scarfadone! (There's more of that finer hemstitching.)


Today's scarfa is 79" long UT.


Up close and personal.

Now for a bit of record keeping: I went back through all the old posts and added the Scarfa # to the title and the Warp # to the labels of each one. This ought to make it easier to refer to a particular scarfa or warp - either by hunting through the archives to find a scarf by its number or by using the labels (now cleverly located in the right sidebar below the blog archive) to go to a page containing all the scarves from and the review of each warp.

And also: I've been in touch with Beth of Comment #3 - the lucky (I hope she agrees!) winner of the scarf kit contest. I'm still super excited about this whole business and she must be too, 'cause she not only agreed to gift me with a guest scarfa post for next week, she's already sent it along with some beeeeooootiful pics. I fear my scarfa kit is going to be fairly tame next to the scarves she's already got on the go!

Speaking of wild weaving (as in wild animal - nudge nudge!), wait until you see Margaret's guest scarves this week - in two day's time, no less! They are really, really fab and totally unlike anything I've ever woven and I'm super anxious to try one myself. This is all I'm going to say right now - come back Friday and see for yourself what I'm all a flutter (wink wink!) about.

Oh, and one more exciting bit of news: I have officially sold my first Scarfaday Scarfa! I took the whole lot of them to our guild meeting last night and one of the other weavers¹ fell in love with Scarfa #15 and decided to take it home. Scarf #15, you may recall, was the one that Ron picked the weft colour for, even though he apparently has no memory of this. ;) See why I love him so? He does the work, I get the glory!

At any rate, now that my first Scarfa has sold, I feel I ought to keep a tally of scarves sold and dollars earned toward Studio 649. Might stick that over on the sidebar, too: One scarf down, 1665 to go! Good job my theme for the moment is "Little By Little", eh wot? :)


1. Also one of my weaving students and one of my very best customers. She and her relatives must have half a dozen of my scarves and runners by now. :D Hi, Sandra! Thanks again!

Oooph, busy day! [Scarf 22]

Had tons and tons to do today and then jammed a dinner date with a friend from out of town into the middle of it, but managed to get everything I absolutely had to do done, including today's scarfa!

This is Warp #7, which I wound last week but never got around to putting on the loom. Today, with Ron's help, it went on lickety-split - good thing, considerin'. The warp is 8/8 cotton again, in blue-ish pinks and burgundies and yellow oranges. It's interesting 'cause it's got both the analogous colour scheme thing going on (reds and oranges) but also some complimentary colour action (the blue tones of the reds and the oranges). My latest yarn order arrived today and I used some of the brand spankin' new stuff for weft. I wove today's scarf... huh. I didn't actually measure it, come to think of it. A bit more than 70", I do believe.

Edit: I went back and measured this scarf later, and it was 69" under tension. Incidentally, I also tried beating this one lighter than I have been: about 8 PPI rather than 9.

And here it is, Scarfa #22:

Scarf #22 under way - about 16" in, looks like

Scarf #22 under way, close up


All done! Shown with spool of yarn used for weft


I never get tired of these shots that show three layers on the loom.