Sampling

Although I've worked with 'collapse' weaves and shrinkage differential quite a bit, ultimately every time you change yarns you have to sample.  If you don't you risk losing the entire project.

So even though I know from previous sampling that the white yarn (Henry's Attic Pony Worsted) fulls very well I've not actually combined it with Tencel before so while I suspect I'm going to get some sort of effect from fulling the wool, there are no guarantees I'll get the effect I'm actually going after.

I started with a combination set of 15 for the wool and 20 for the Tencel and my first sample is plain weave.

While plain weave will have to be fulled much more energetically than a twill structure, I wanted the best visual blending of the colours of the two different yarns.  The reason I'm using white is because I don't have any dyed and I've no time to do any. 

While I suspect I'm going to get the most fulling with the wool weft, sometimes you can be surprised so I wove about 6" with wool weft and about 8" with Tencel.  Tomorrow I'll beat the sample up good and see what happens.  If it works I've got enough warp on the loom to weave a scarf.  If it doesn't I'll be changing the parameters and weaving more samples.  None of it will go to waste as the samples will become teaching examples.  ;)

Currently reading Falling Backwards by Jann Arden