Copper Roses

When digging around the stash, matching bouclé yarns with smooth, I stumbled upon a trio that looked really nice together. What seemed like fairly bland reddish-brown and orange bouclé yarns somehow gained a sumptuous metallic gleam next to a purple (blackberry nip) Bendigo Classic 3ply. How could I not weave something with the combo?

A while back I made a draft I called “roses” because of the bright reds I’d chosen for it, but it took only a few tweaks to adapt it to the new colours. It looked great, so I started planning for a scarf, conscious that I didn’t have enough of the orange bouclé for anything larger.

To ensure the orange wouldn’t run out, I wound it onto the warping board set to the length of the scarf, then counted the number of ends. Since that included loom waste, I knew I could plan to warp a little bit over half of the number of ends in orange, since the spacing of it in the weft was the same as the warp. Factoring in these limitations, I knew I’d have a narrower scarf than the ones I’ve been weaving, but still a good size. So warped up the loom and got weaving.

Since I’m weaving almost only on weekends now, and July to October seems like birthday season, the scarf came together at a leisurely pace. I was happy to find these bouclé yarns worked as well as the grey I’ve used in the last three projects. There’s less than a bobbin of orange left, but plenty of the reddish-brown, which wove up nicely and I’d like to use in another DDW scarf.

The last third was woven a bit faster due to wanting to start the next project. A friend gave me some interesting slubby yarn from a scarf that had unravelled. I offered to weave it into a shawl for her, and when I showed her a few examples of items that make a feature of a fancy yarn she was instantly attracted to honeycomb. I’m thinking of weaving a test shawl with some slubby in the stash. Which means my next projects aren’t going to be more bouclé Deflected Doubleweave, but I do hope to get back to it.