It’s been more than a year since I warped the AKL. Used to be I’d have a project on it nearly all of the time, but after all the prep for the workshop I did January last year I took a break. It wasn’t meant to last this long, but much of my weaving attention and creativity went into the 4-shaft course, which I’m certainly not complaining about!

Even after weaving nearly constantly on the AKL for sixteen years (gosh!), there are still a few methods I haven’t tried. One was clasped warp. It was meant to be the next one I did but every time I tried matching up colours for it nothing quite worked. Part of the problem was coming up with a weft yarn that wouldn’t spoil the look of the two warp yarns.

I had another go at it recently, and as I pawed through sock yarns It was thinking back to the Echo and Jin workshop. We used a finer yarn for the weft so the warp colours dominated. The same approach might work on this scarf.

Most of my sock yarn isn’t solid, and the few solids I have are either not a good match for the multicolour yarns or are but don’t provide good contrast – you need contrast with clasped warp (and weft) for the effect to be visible. I applied the principles of matching patterns in clothing: go for different kinds of pattern. Like stripes and florals, or pin stripe and spots, or random and regular, or fine and large. I had a speckle-dyed grey yarn, and a striped dark red and purple yarn. Perfect.

And for the weft… a solid. By going even thinner I had a wide choice of fine wool yarns to choose from. I chose one that would disappear in the striped yarn, and hopefully only add to the flecked nature of the speckled one.

Warping was easy. Instead of threading a loop through every slot of the heddle then, after the loop is cut, moving one thread into the neighbouring hole, you thread a loop in slots and holes. The second yarn loops through this to the peg. Which means every thread is a double thread, and you weave half basketweave.

I beat very lightly so the weft was well spaced. Which made the weaving quite fast.