A while back I used up some alpaca yarn by matching it with some black old Patonyle sock yarn and weaving it up on the rigid heddle loom. I decided to make another Ruffles Scarf, this time with some of the feltable yarn (the alpaca) in the weft as well. Here it is pre-felting:

It took me a while to get around to the felting, partly because I thought it was quite attractive as it was. But I’d woven it very loosely to allow for the felting, and that wasn’t going to make for a very robust scarf. So into the front-loader it went, with a couple of pairs of jeans for company.

I’m glad I went ahead with the felting. The texture is lovely. It’s very soft, too.

I have some leftover bamboo yarn that I didn’t fancy knitting into anything, so my next project was another scarf. This one had some leno twists at either end.

The bamboo is rather slippery and I doubt any ends would stay put long, so I decided the weft had to be done with one ball – no joins. I’ve found that if I use the same yarn for both warp and weft, and the weave is fairly balanced and even, then one ball of warp usually takes up one ball of weft.

The scarf is lovely and drapey. I have enough for another scarf, and I’ll probably do another kind of decorative effect on it. As always, I don’t know what I’ll do with the scarves. But I’m learning to not worry about that. I keep those my very favourites, and the others find a home with friends or family or a charity.

I still have plenty more to post about this week: more bookbinding projects, a twill blanket off the loom, a new book, and this week’s Sketch Sunday. Some projects needed that last photograph taken, so I’ve been organising that this weekend. And I’ve had a head cold, so there’s been a lot of pottering around doing a bit of this and a bit of that (rather than work), but not a lot of blog post writing.

A few years ago Cleckheaton put out a couple of graduated yarns. I became enamoured of Vintage Hues when weaving up charity scarves last year, and whenever it came up in a stash bust I’d grab it. Then when it was to be discontinued it went on sale, and I bought even more.

Around the same time last year I wove my first big twill project, the Leftovers Blanket and loved the way the varigated yarns looked in it. It was suddenly clear that the Vintage Hues would look good in twill, too. But what contrast colour? I bought some black Dale Garn, but there were three shades of Vintage Hues. Which to use with the black? What about the other two?

Well, after my recent stash cull I did some match-making.

The honey coloured contrast yarn is the Cleckheaton Country I recently dyed with eucalyptus leaves. I was intending to overdye it to get a colour I’ll be more likely to wear, but then it occurred to me that it would go well with the purple-green-yellow VH. The natural white coloured yarn is some Corriedale Clip yarn that came ‘in the grease’. I knit some beanies out of it, but the smell of the lanolin must have attracted moths and when I went to use them later they were full of holes. I frogged them and washed the lanolin out. There were a lot of breaks in the yarn because of the moths, but that would be okay for warp, since it’s cut into lengths anyway. I matched it to the purple-green VH.

I decided to weave up the white and purple/green VH first. There wasn’t a lot of the white, and a small blanket in a simple 2×2 twill seemed like a good warm up. But how wide the blanket was would affect how quickly the VH colours would graduate. I decided to do a quick test:

I wound VH around a board about half the size of the loom’s width. This told me that the colours wouldn’t graduate to quickly and just become stripes. Then I wove, by hand, some white yarn through it to see how well the colours would contrast.

I put some white card either side. Yep, it looked good.

Then I warped up the loom and got weaving. Before long it I could tell that it was going to be as beautiful as I’d imagined. I can’t wait to put the next blanket on the loom. I’m going to weave the honey and purple-green yellow in 3×1 twill, and then the black and blue-purple in a more complex twill that forms a wavy pattern.

Unless I get tired of twill. If that happens, there are a couple of rag rugs in my queue that are calling to me, too.