Having fun with sock yarns!

This is my second scarf woven with Noro Nureyon Sock yarn for warp and Trekking sock yarn in the weft. Set at 15 epi, woven on my Leclerc Voyageur loom. I'm really delighted with this scarf, it looks amazing with my favourite red jumper (seen in this badly lit photo).

I wore it to work and the reactions were very interesting. A couple of people were unreservedly amazed and impressed. A couple of others said although it looks superb they couldn't wear such a scarf because they don't like the feel of wool and think it scratchy. I could get around that by weaving similar colours in silk.

I think I should say a bit more about design. Before I started weaving the first of these scarves I spent a long time studying they many superb patterns in my Janet Phillip's sample blanket. I'm really looking forward to using some of the 500 patterns in my weaving. However, I realised that a simple diagonal twill was going to give better feel and drape to a fairly thick wool yarn.

The colour choice for this pink/orange scarf was inspired by Cally's work with similar hot colours. I'd never have thought of putting these kind of shades together if I hadn't seen how well they work for Cally and also got my colour sampler to refer to. I think the more one looks at things and works with different colour ideas the more an understanding builds up. Playing with colours is important, literally playing - like Cally's colouring book, or just sitting with the different coloured yarns in your stash and arranging them differently. So much that we dismiss as child's play is about building understanding of how things work.

Just a reminder of the yarns I used, note that the orange Trekking yarn has shade variations that give the scarf bands of different intensity in the weft (see above).


Next I picked up my green yarns, and I changed reed from a 15 dent to an 8 dent threaded at 16 epi. The slightly denser warp makes little difference, but the reed threaded 2 ends per dent was kinder to the warp. The 15 epi reed had rubbed against the warp yarns more and caused a little wear during the weaving.


This scarf had perfect looking selvedges on the loom -

which I attribute:
(a) to weighting the selvedge yarns behind the loom (they were not beamed with the warp, just looped up and weighted with a lead weight from the fishing shop, 4oz) and
(b) to a cute little Glimakra temple, see below.


However, when I took the scarf off the loom the selvedges looked a bit less perfect, in fact, a bit wavy. I was a bit surprised by this, I'd carefully moved the temple about every half inch woven. However, it doesn't detract at all from the scarf, maybe it is just a reminder that it this is handwoven.


This is a close up of the fabric. I like the effect of the intermittent short pink/purple and light green sections in the Trekking sock yarn used as weft, the effect is slightly like a tartan cloth.
p.s. the pictures of my scarves in this and my last-but-one post can be enlarged if you click on a photo.