The twill scarf, olive silk/merino and navy merino/flax/silk (April 12, 2005)

Still felt a bit off yesterday, so went home and tried to get to bed early. That didn't stop me from getting a lot of work done during the day though - all in all, it was quite a productive day.



Project 1: the twill scarf

The old, small loom that I am renting, with the fancy twill scarf on it.



The draft I used to make the scarf



Detail of the scarf, from front and from the side. The scarf is made with a commercial, 8-ply pure wool warp, and a handspun, approximately 5-ply wool sliver weft. You don't really want to use handspun for the warp, partly because it takes and wastes so much, and partly because it may not be strong enough. I'm realy pleased with the way the pattern's coming out, though - from a distance it looks like a normal twill. It's only when you look more closely that the intricacy of the pattern comes out.



Project 2: Beanie and scarf for H.

A reminder of what the blue merino/flax blend looked like unspun:



Four skeins of the spun wool, resulting from 200g of fibre. The four are all slightly different: the one on the left (roughly 60m) is plied with itself. There was a touch of white silk I'd used on the end of the wool to attach it to the bobbin and that looked really good, so I plied the two middle skeins with two strands of the blue merino/flax, incorporating a thin strand of white spun silk cap with one of the singles. That's given the white flecks. Gives a nice effect. The two middle skeins are roughly 45 m each. The fourth skein on the right is just the ends of the three bobbins, about 8 m. All of the wool came out at about a 10-ply except for the small skein, which is more like 12-ply. I've made a sample swatch of knitting to teach myself to knit but I'm not really happy with the results, so I'm going to get the girls to double-check what I'm doing on Thursday night before I start the beanie proper.



Project 3: Silk and merino scarf for myself

I have bought some olive merino top to match the silk caps I spun and dyed, and plan to spin that up and ply it with the silk. Haven't started that yet. I'm playing with the caramel suri alpaca at the moment, but that's not really a lot of fun (it's breaking a lot and won't twist on well), so it may take a back burner so I can make this and move on with weaving. I'm probably going to weave it up with a khaki rayon yarn I've bought (on the right), unless I find a more suitable colour.



I also have a roan alpaca fibre, about 200g worth, which is much nicer to spin than the suri. I may also play with that.