I thought I had photos of me holding a big ball of weft for this project. It was a length of velvet cut into one long strip and wound into a ball, and it looked rather impressive. But I can’t find it.

This is one of those projects that sprang out of an intention, but soon evolved away from it, yet somehow ended up with the same end result. I had a big piece of black velour in my fabric stash that I thought might weave up into a nice evening wrap. Then I adopted a smaller piece of red velour. This was going to be my Goth Wrap.

Later I wound up with another piece of fabric – some rather syntheticy velvet of about the same weight as the velour. For the warp I chose some Bendigo Cotton 4ply from an abandoned crochet jacket project. (I discovered I didn’t like and wasn’t good enough at crochet to want to make an entire jacket.) I measured and tied on enough for a two metre shawl/wrap.

When I went to chop up the velour, however, I realised that both the black and red pieces would be great backdrops for Paul’s photography. So I let him adopt them. That left me with the velvet. It took me an hour to cut it up in a big square spiral, walking around the dining table many, many times as I did. (Yay excercise!)

I started weaving and about halfway I realised that I wasn’t going to get two metres of fabric. I’d get barely more than a square. This wasn’t good. Wraps are supposed to, you know, wrap around you.

So I unwove it all. The fabric I’d got had been fairly thick, so I needed a way to weave looser. I decided to do a shot of the Bendy cotton between each shot of velvet. This worked really well to open up the fabric, and created an interesting grid-like pattern.

Last Saturday I did the final bit of weaving, and discovered that I still wasn’t going to make it to two metres. So I dug through my fabric stash and found a piece of black satin. I cut it up and wove it, and found that I liked the subtle change from matt to shiny at the end of the shawl. I still didn’t make it to the end of the warp, but it wasn’t far off, so I cut the warp and tied the fringe – keeping it nice and long to add to the overall length.

Only as I was tying the last of the fringe did I look down and realise there was still about a third of the ball of velvet weft left, sitting where I’d left it the last time I’d been weaving.

There was some cursing.

I’d cut the warp. There was no going back. So I wet finished (washed) the wrap and trimmed the fringe and tossed the leftover weft in a place I couldn’t see it and hopefully pretend it didn’t exist.

This is what happens when you do in snatches of spare time: you forget things. You get a little tired of a project and slip into finishitis mode.

The washing did interesting things to the edges:

Either the cotton shrank or the velvet strips relaxed, but I’ve ended up with excess weft forming loops at the edge of the wraps. I rather like the way it looks. And the wrap feels much nicer and looks more interesting than if I’d simply hemmed the rather syntheticy piece of velvet.