Tale of Two Scarves

Finally, after all that spinning last week, I ended up with enough yarn to warp the loom for 2 scarves. I put on a little bit longer warp so that I could use the leftover end as a dummy warp for some more scarves. The warp is a singles spun from some dyed corriedale that I had and the handspun part of the weft is the same thing. I had several close shades of a mossy green so I interspersed them throughout the warp. It is sett at 8 epi and I wove them in plain weave at 8 ppi.

The novelty yarn in the first scarf is 2 strands together but not plied. One is a khaki green mohair that has occasional variegations and the other strand is lots of bright colors, pink, yellows, turquoise, orange, purple and a good bit of gold metallic. It is meant to be a knitting yarn and I was wondering how it would knit up as I was weaving with it. I alternated a handspun and novelty every other pick and that turned out really pretty. There is a slight halo from the mohair and the bright colors pop out but yet are subtued by the green and the metallic added some nice shimmer.

The other yarn is more like a ribbon but it has a structure where it is more solid and then less solid so it collapses more here and there and also, one side has a wool flocked zigzag going through it. Very unusual stuff. It is bright greens and dark greens, true red, and purple with deeper purples. It reminds me of eggplants and tomatoes in a garden. This one I wove 2 picks of deep green handspun, one of the ribbon, 3 picks handspun, one of the ribbon and so on. It has a totally different look and feel from the first one. This novelty was softer so it was more influenced by the energetic singles that the other one was. Both turned out well and I am pleased with them.

I rarely buy yarn anymore but this was a good experience because I learned something from each of these different yarns. Things about color and also about texture. I have another ball of novelty yarn to play with next. I carded up some blue corriedale this morning to see how that will go with it. I also think that some of the fibers I dyed up a few weeks ago will work with the colors in this one.

One of the yarns that I spun up last week was a variegated yarn that I thought would go with one of these novelties but didn't. It was still a nice yarn though, so I spun another bobbin so that I could weave a whole scarf just of this yarn. That will probably be next week's project but I also have to weave on those bands for some purses.