A Bevy of Shawls: Holden

I decided to take some time today to photograph some old projects that I've never shown off. One of the ones I had on my list was this lovely Holden shawl. When I started uploading the photos onto Ravelry, I realized that I finished this over a year ago! I've worn it a fair bit during that time, because I love how it turned out - such a beautiful but simple neutral accessory.


Initially I bought this yarn (Viking of Norway Baby Ull, which is a fingering weight baby merino) to make a pair of socks. When that didn't exactly work out the way I hoped, it disappeared into the stash for a little while, before I pulled it out again to use it for this project. Holden is such a lovely pattern that I knew a simple yarn would work well and show off the lace. I love the feminine design in a basic elegant grey.


After blocking, the hand of this fabric is really great. The warm soft halo of this yarn makes the texture of the shawl just luxurious. It is quite warm and wraps around into a lovely scarf, too.

A Year in the Planning

Okay, not really. I had it planned out and ready to go, way back when, but sometimes things just fall behind in the weaving queue, you know? So after making numerous showy towels and scarves and whatnot, throughout this whole year, I finally feel like this project's time has come. (I laughed when I read the bit in last year's post about "one more project before this one." A textbook example of the best laid plans, I think.) Perhaps the best impetus of all is that it's been a bit chilly of late, so why not prepare for the winter by weaving a toasty blanket?


I mentioned in that first post that I'm weaving it in two panels. This is the beginning of the first one, six repeats across and eighteen long. When I finish the second panel and attach them, the finished blanket will be twelve repeats by eighteen, which should be somewhere around 45 inches by 60 inches, the perfect size for napping on the sofa.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

Does anyone want to hazard a guess regarding what this portends?

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.

Kindergarten Scarves

One of the lovely ladies I knit with regularly is a kindergarten teacher. A purer heart you will never encounter. She mentioned a while ago that some of her kids can't really afford proper winter wear, which is obviously a must in Edmonton. I thought that the least I could do was contribute a few scarves from some random and/or leftover wool I had. Knitting makes great scarves, but so does weaving, and it's waaaay faster. So I paired up some colours and picked some drafts from my Handweaver's Pattern Directory, and started. Four days later, four cool scarves for kindergarteners.


Thursday: I started with a simple neutral zig zag in browns. This is some leftover Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, and when I took it off the loom and washed it, it fluffed up a lot and made a super air-filled scarf. It will be warm, for sure. This one set the standard for the rest, with 10 epi, and aiming for about 6" wide and 50" long.


Friday: I tied this warp onto the last one, since it used the same threading and the same number of ends. I just did a different treadling for this one, also out of Wool of the Andes, and it made kind of a cool polka-dot almost-stripe thing. In the photo, on the left and center panels, you are looking at the front of the fabric. On the right you are seeing the back of the fabric. Similar but different. When I finished this one, I put a little more effort into fulling it when I washed it, and it ended up a very nice cohesive fabric.


Saturday: For the third one, I put together two great shades of green Cascade 220 - a searing apple green and a mellow teal - and, after rejecting several design possibilities, decided that nothing would do but to revisit the zig zag. I love how it looks in these two colours. The whole time I was weaving it, I wished it was for me. It makes me grin every time I look at it. There is something Kermit the Froggish about it, I think.


Sunday: Lastly, I pulled out two more skeins of Cascade 220 and did a variation of Hopsack with a two-colour warp and weft. I don't know the name of this pattern, but I've been wanting to weave it for a while. It's sort of a minimalist houndstooth or something. Anyway, I love the effect of the two-colour warp and weft, and also love these two colours together. I bought them ages ago to make a pair of herringbone mittens, but just never got around to it.

So that's the end of my Four Scarves in Four Days series. Of course, after I finished the four I'd planned, I realized I still have enough leftover yarn for at least a couple more. So I pulled out the warping board and got back to work.

Woobu Scarf: Take Two

For the second iteration of the leftover Woobu scarves, I decided to revisit a fancy-looking twill design that I used for my very first ever weaving project. The Handweaver's Pattern Directory tells me that it's a variation on M & W threading. Me, I just did what it said to do, and hoped for the best.

If you compare this scarf to the original, you will see the similarities, as well as some differences. The original was done in a super-drapey bamboo yarn, which was quite fine. This yarn is of course a much fluffier wool and bamboo blend. After blocking, it does have a surprising amount of drape for a wooly scarf.


Unfortunately my indoor photo shoot washed out the colours a bit, due to the sheen of the yarn - the design does actually stand out quite a bit better than it appears to, in these photos.

Having finished that one, I am in a bit of a scarf-frenzy right now. More to show off, tomorrow!

Busy Bee

I've been AWOL for a bit because I caught a case of finish-itis. Unfortunately not also a case of taking-photos-itis.

Hallowe'en came and went and I'm particularly pleased with this year's costume: the adorable and beloved Bee Girl from Blind Melon's No Rain video.

Obviously I knit the armwarmers and the hat (from KnitPicks Palette), and just altered a yellow henley t-shirt for the top. Most of the effort went into sewing the tutu, which entailed me nearly drowning in 6 yards of black netting and yellow ribbon. Having never made a tutu before, it was a bit of a hack, but certainly good enough.


A lot of people didn't get the reference, and just thought I was a bumblebee, which was okay, because the people who do remember Bee Girl loved it and I made people giggle happily all day, and feel a warm golden glow of reminiscence.

Woobu Scarf: Take One

Although my yarn stash isn't yet taking over my home, it is slowly growing excessive. As most knitters do, I periodically pledge to make some projects from yarn out of my stash, rather than buying more yarn. Sometimes that's easier to do than others. In this case, it was an inspiration to dig out some gorgeous Woobu that I had left over from two projects (oops, that reminds me of two more Finished Objects I haven't yet blogged...) Once I dug it out of my closet, I realized that I have just tons of it. I decided to make two (maybe even three) woven scarves with it.


The Jengu yarn is the whiter one - I used that for the warp of the scarf, in a point threading. Then I wove a 2/2 reversing twill to match, using the Irish Girlie Green. The colours in the green look pretty fantastic, not least of which is because of the sheen of the bamboo in the yarn.


It was a challenge for me to weave this loose enough - after having woven so many towels out of cotton/linen, I am used to beating the weft yarn pretty firmly. Even while trying to be gentle, I still started this out with far too many picks per inch, and had to unweave a bit and try again. It was a very quiet and gentle project, and I enjoyed the beautiful colours for every bit of it. In fact, while I was weaving this scarf, I kept thinking that it must be the prettiest thing I've ever made. After weaving, I twisted some fringe for the ends, and then gave it a bath in some Soak and laid it out to dry.


Once again, the whole scarf took only two days (which ultimately means I finished two whole scarves, start to finish, in four days!) It seemed to take a bit longer to dry than the alpaca, and resulted in a firmer fabric than the previous scarf did. That might be due to the much springier nature of this yarn in comparison to the relative lack of stretch in the alpaca. I am planning a second scarf with the same warp & weft combo, but in a different twill design, and right now I'm considering whether I might want to make that one a bit looser, at maybe 10 ends per inch, rather than 12. The jury is still out on that.

End results: a pretty scarf, a smaller stash, another project out of my head and into my hands. Big win.

Grey on Gray Twill Scarf

The greatest part of finishing the towels is that I finally got to start working on the scarves I had in my head. The greatest part about weaving scarves is that they are so darn quick. I put this one on the loom on Monday and finished weaving and had it off the loom by Tuesday night.


I wanted to make a scarf for my HLM, since I have only ever made him one scarf (a rather impractical one I knit years ago, pre-blogging.) He mostly wears black and muted colours, like many guys, although he has started to branch out into colour in recent years. I decided to stick with a monochromatic scarf, to try to make it very wearable for him, so I chose two shades of grey in a luxurious soft alpaca. I made it nice and wide, so it can cover face and neck, and long enough to wind around the neck once and still hang down enough to tuck into his coat.


I wove it in a simple 2/2 twill, with both colours in both warp and weft, which creates a simple and masculine block design. It is similar to a gingham, but I assure you that I had this scarf planned out long before I decided on a whim to make a gingham towel. The sett is 15 ends per inch, which seemed great while I was weaving, but once I unwound the cloth from the loom, it felt so stiff that I thought I had woven it too tight. I washed it in a sink full of Soak (and was shocked at how filthy the water got during that wash) and laid it out to dry overnight. By yesterday morning, I knew it was okay.


Now that it's completely dry, the hand is great: it drapes well and has lots of movement on the bias. Some of the softness of the alpaca is constrained by the weave structure, but it will be interesting to see how the fabric changes with wear, as some of the guard hairs come loose to enhance the sensation of softness. As well, I expect the alpaca will begin to full together with use, as has been my experience in the past with alpaca garments.

In any event, my HLM seems pleased with it, and it will certainly keep him warm once winter comes again to the Great White North.

Allover Stars Towels

I have come to realize that one of my blogging problems is that I love the moment of the reveal so much that I often forget to post in-progress photos. Here we are again, with a project that I didn't get around to mentioning until it was already completed. Yes, it's another set of woven towels, but the last ones I'll subject you to, for a while.


After I finished the Striped Star towels, I folded up my loom and worked for a bit on a quilt top that I wanted to finish (oops, there's another work-in-progress I haven't shown off, yet.) I had several woven scarves bouncing around in my brain, but I decided to put them off until I wove one more set of towels. That's because I realized that I could just tie the warp for these towels onto the warp from the Striped Star towels (very easily because it is the same yarn at the same sett and threading) which saved me the effort of having to put 450-ish ends through the reed and heddles individually, and also saved a bit of length in the warp. Okay, that was probably greek to most of you who aren't weavers, but in simplest terms, it saved me a day or two (or four) of effort by tying the warp on. That way, I could get to the weaving part a lot sooner. I got it tied on with virtually no problems, and was weaving right away. They went quickly, with each towel taking about two days to finish.


When I mentioned to my sister that I was going to do towels with allover stars, rather than just intermittent stars where the stripes cross, she said: "Oh, won't that be awfully busy?" (She clearly takes after my mother, who says that every hexagon quilt I make looks awfully busy.) I knew it wouldn't, and thought that it would be sort of like a gingham, which isn't busy at all, but has a pleasing repetitive design. As I was weaving the first of the star towels, I realized that the threading for them was the same as the threading for gingham. The sett (how many threads are in one inch of weaving) was closer for the star design than I would want it for plain-woven gingham, but I decided to risk it, for one of the four towels, anyway. It did end up a little stiffer than the other towels, and I couldn't quite get the squares to be square (because the warp threads were a bit too close to let the weft thread push far enough between them.) Still: so cute.


I hemmed the four towels by hand and then threw them in for a machine wash and tumble dry. They shrunk a bit, and the weave collapsed in, like a waffle-weave would. I steam ironed them and they flattened out nicely and have a soft absorbent hand, like the previous set did. Oh, and did I mention that the back of the towels has the reverse design: white stars on a purple background?