My little digi camera died the other day and it makes me sad. I love that camera! It’s been so many places with me. I’ve won camera club prizes with photos taken on it. It’s provided countless pics for my blogs and recorded many, many knit projects. I know what most of the menus and functions and such do. But I guess that’s the down side of a tool that is very useful and works well – you wear it out.

I’m not camera-less, however. That’s not possible when you live with a hobby photographer and camera collector! It’s taken me a while to get the following pics up here only because I’m still feeling poorly.

Pics of what? Well, after I wrote the last post I decided to tackle the alpaca yarn. It was leftover from the Sizzle Vest, and I’d knit the yarn tripled to get gauge. So I had some shorter lengths of tripled yarn – maybe a few metres – and a ball of it. It would be too much trouble to separate the three threads, so I’d weave it as is.

I got to thinking about those shorter lengths. I could try using them as warp, but that would make for a short scarf. If I used them as weft there’d be lots of rejoining. Then I had a flash of inspiration. What about creating a fringe along the length of the scarf? I’d seen this done before. So after warping the loom I scrounged up some wire, hooked it to the front beam and tied it to the back beam, to the right of the reed.

Each shot of the weft then went around the wire. Whenever I wanted to advance the loom I first cut the weft where it folded around the wire, then knotted it.

It didn’t matter that the first bit of the scarf was woven with short lengths, as it was being cut to make the fringe anyway.

I worked out pretty quickly that I didn’t really need wire. Any stiff string would have worked just as well because the beating of the reed keeps it in place ensures each piece of the fringe is the same width. I also worked out that I should beat too firmly or there wasn’t much space for the fringe knots.

It was a lot of fun to do and I’m tempted to keep this scarf, not just because I like it but because it’s alpaca, which I’m not as sensitive to. But I’d also like to try variations on the method.

For a start I might try skipping the fringe wire/string every second time to make a less crowded fringe. Or make a fringe on both sides of the scarf. Or perhaps even sift through all my loom waste and see if any of it is long enough that I can make a fringed scarf.

In the meantime, though, I’ve warped up the loom to weave yet more charity scarves, this time out of leftover handspun. And updating my stash spreadsheet has given me many more ideas, too. I suspect there’ll be more than ten scarves sent off to bushfire victims by the time I’m though.