My latest project is almost complete. I just finished the weaving portion of the 8/2 tencel scarf on the Baby Wolf. The warp is charcoal while all the weft was reclaimed from a project that seriously pissed me off and was called done early. Way back a few months ago I measured out a long enough warp in three colors the do three scarves.
What was supposed to happen was that I’d weave each of the these with one of the colors. Unfortunately while weaving the silver warp threads kept drifting apart and I kept having to repair a number of them through the entire width over and over again. I pushed through and finished the first one with the white weft.
Several inches into the silver weft version and I was repairing warp threads every 1-3″ of weaving. I’d had enough. Weaving was supposed to be therapeutic and it was doing the opposite. I called it and cut it off. And in a fit of anger just pulled the remaining yards of warp off and made a mess of it. The knitter in me just couldn’t throw it away though. I had this mess on my desk that I’d fiddle with during daily meetings as I work from home.
Well one evening after work I was tired and didn’t feel like doing any of the other craft projects so I sat and untied this ball of spaghetti, winding it on a cardboard storage bobbin. There might have been a few shots of alcohol to temper me 😉
See! A lot of yarn left. I couldn’t just toss it. Original warp was something like 7 yards long. I decided to weave a new scarf using all this as weft taking random lengths as I wove. No way that silver tencel was to be warp again but I had enough charcoal left to measure out a three yard warp. I had to hand wind the bobbins one length at a time and really tried to randomize the colors. And yes those are 1″ strips cut from a Cheerios box that I used as a warp spreader and spacer. (I’m going to post another time about how I tie on and have a need for a spacer)
I hit the other end today and after hem stitching I cut it off the loom.
As a preview to my post of another day, I’ve seriously minimized the amount of loom waste which makes the knitter/spinner in me happy. We don’t like wasting yarn! I could have woven more and still gotten a clean shed but I was tired of winding bobbins and the scarf is over 70″ already not counting the fringe.
Of course it isn’t done yet. It needs to be washed, ironed and have its fringes trimmed. Not to mention that there are a million ends from each color change that need to be cut off. Each of the reclaimed warp ends worked out to be approx .5″ of weaving.
Craft on.
