Waay back at the Kay Plus Fun workshop, I dyed a pre-wound warp of 8/2 cotton in a gradient of green and purple.
I’ve always wanted to weave a deflected doubleweave scarf like this:
It’s the “Bumps in the Night” scarf by Madelyn van der Hoogt, published in Best of Handwoven: Deflected Doubleweave. The trouble was, finding a non-machine washable yarn for the black warp and weft wasn’t easy. Eventually I worked out that two of the cones I’d picked up at a sale were feltable, and if used doubled were close enough to the 8/2 cotton to suit.
I wish I’d taken a photo to show the efforts required to divide a black warp up into 4 x 2 thread batches, placing each batch between 8 thread batches of cotton that had every second batch reversed. It was… amazing it didn’t turn into an unusable tangle. Using the raddle as a comb to loop each batch over made it a little bit easier.
Once I overcame the weft colour issue mentioned a few posts ago, the weaving progressed steadily. It looked great and I knew I’d made the right decision.
Then it was just a matter of tossing it in the washing machine and hoping the black wool would shrink enough, but not too much, to produce the ‘bumps’.
Which it did. Which is a relief and very satisfying. I love it and will definitely play with deflected doubleweave again.
Hi! Stumbled onto your terrific blog while searching for the “Bumps in the Night” scarf. I’m an experienced weaver (30+yrs), but this pattern I suspect has an error…8S…thread the wool at 1 end/dent, the cotton at 2 ends/dent – BUT, the pattern threading is for the cotton to be 1 end/shaft (8ends in a pattern repeat)…what did you do?
I’m thinking of following the draft (not the written description). Confirming that there’s something amiss with this draft…Thanks!
Your scarf turned out lovely! I agree, the painted warp shows MUCH better with the solid dark weft. Nicely done!
Hi Jennifer! Thank you! 😀
When it came to denting… Well, since I didn’t use the yarn specified in the project, I worked out my own denting. First I calculated the epi for the yarns I used (1/2 wpi). Of course, the two yarns had different epi, but not very different and the black yarn was going to be fulled anyway. So I chose a denting order that matched the reed spacing best. I think I also considered whether a 10 or 12 dpi reed was better, too.
Here in Australia we often don’t have access to the yarns in magazines published overseas, and I learned from my years of knitting to just find a similar yarn and do the sums.
It was this! Just thought the idea of combining cotton with feltable wool was very exciting, and the texture very cool. I once dabbled with feltable and non-feltable wool in the same knitted piece. Should return to the idea…