Once the Country Rag Rug was off the loom, I started considering what to weave next. Why this can’t be a simple decision, I cannot guess. This time it involved going through my stash spreadsheet and marking everything that I’d bought second hand, or was older than ten years. A blog post by another weaver had got me thinking about old yarn, and the wisdom of “use it or you lose it”.

The first yarn I marked that I had a project I intended to weave it into was the one I chose to use. I didn’t bother weighing up all the other options. I wasn’t in the mood for all that deliberation. Just do it, I told myself.

A bit of yarn matching deliberation did follow, however. The yarn is from a batch I’d bought on ebay of mostly used cones from a mill. It’s a thin blue and white ply, with the white having slubby bits. The wpi was the same as 8/2 cotton, but I decided to wind it with some 16/2 cotton to up the blueness.

This would be an easy plain weave project. The yarn was already complex enough and I didn’t want to lose the effect of the slubby white against the blue, which reminded me of distant clouds. And I felt like weaving something meditative.

I used the same yarn combo for weft. That made it a little bit less zen, as I had to wrangle the inevitable yarn length mismatching on the shuttle and the tension of wondering if the remaining mill ends would last to the end of the warp.

They didn’t, but they lasted long enough to make enough fabric for the top I want to weave. The fabric, off the loom, was quite open and a little hard, but it closed and softened up nicely after a wash and press.

Now I just have to get to the sewing part. I’m in no hurry. Summer is a while off. And I have a naked loom and plenty of weaving projects lined up after reorganising the stash yet again.