Monday, November 21, 2011

Revisiting the Kindergarten


The first pair of colours I matched up for the second series was some beautiful heathered Cascade 220, possibly my two favourites of all their many shades. There was a lovely sort of wheat yellow with green heathered throughout it, and a sort of greeny grey brown. They look lovely together, and have a bit more contrast to the naked eye than this photo would appear. What I love about this scarf, another version of Hopsack with a 2-colour warp, is that one side of the fabric has vertical stripes while the other side has horizontal stripes. I wish it was clearer in the photo, but nevertheless, it might give some little kid something to ponder.


The next pair of colours is also Cascade 220 -- I was planning to use the magenta with a dark wine red, but there wasn't enough contrast to show the pattern well, so I went in a very different direction and grabbed some more of the bright green. The two colours clash terrifically, which I think kids like, right? Anyway, I did a herringbone twill with some basketweave strips between. I saw a draft sort of like this one on Weavolution, and adapted it and cleaned it up a bit to use it for this scarf. I like how it turned out, and it certainly reminded me of how much I love a simple herringbone twill.


Lastly, I pulled bits of many of the colours I'd already used and wound a random little warp to weave in random stripes of plain weave. I decided to do plain weave instead of twill, because I wanted the various colours in warp and weft to intermingle and blend and create some interesting hues. I think it went pretty well, although I have to admit that I enjoyed this one the least, perhaps because I prefer having a bit of structure, rather than so much freedom. Is that weird? I also had to change the sett, to 8 ends per inch, which seemed maybe a bit loose on the loom, but fluffed up nicely once I soaked and washed and fulled it a bit.

A cute little stack of woolen scarves.

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