Remember those yarns I was going to cull but looked good together? Well I did weave something out of them: a shawl.

It was very lazy weaving. I wound the warp with six threads held together. The heathery purple broke so I knew it would never survive being a warp. It was moth-eaten, and the holes went deep, so it went in the trash. So I unwound and replaced it with a fine green and a blue yarn from the stash.

Initially, I thought I might treat each bunch of seven threads as one. I didn’t have set ideas, though. The wpi was 6epi, and I thought that might be too large for the heddles. The possibility of weaving a goose-eye twill had me reconsidering, too. My reed is 10epi. If I divided the seven threads in half I could put one half in each dent. Would that make too sleazy a fabric? I wouldn’t know until I tried it. I figured I could alway rethread the reed.

It turned out that the sett was a bit too dense, so I spaced it out to 0,1,1,1. Then I tied on and began weaving, using a thin black yarn doubled on a two-pirn shuttle so the weft was 4 strands thick. This came close enough to a balanced weave to show the goose-eye pattern well.

And I soon fell in love with it. The pattern looks beautiful and the fabric feels lovely. It was easy to treadle without being boring. Many episodes of the Conscious Chatter podcast were played over the next week or so, and finally I was at the end. I cut it off, plaited the fringe, gave it a wash and voila! Done:

Of course, I then had to put yarn back in the stash. It would have been too much of a coincidence if all these leftover cones had the same quantity of yarn on them and I used them all up at the same time. But I only put about 200 grams back, and with the warp for the Fancy Log Cabin Blanket being wound the stash was still well below 35 kilos.