Saturday, May 7, 2011

Turquoise Shawls


The merino/bamboo/silk yarn is fairly thick for weaving - 2100 yards per pound.  When I used it for both warp and weft in a twill I set it at 16 epi/ppi which produced a fairly thick fabric.  While I was happy enough with it for cosy shawls and baby blankets, I felt that it was a bit too heavy for fashionable shawls to be worn with a suit or for summer wear.

Turning to my fine threads stash, I found lots of options - a singles yarn in various 'exotic' combinations, plus a variety of fine wools that I'd collected over the years.

Setting the merino/bamboo/silk at 16 and using plain weave instead of twill, these finer yarns are working up a nice light weight fabric which should be great for shawls for cool summer evenings or for office wear.

The current weft is a 2/40's worsted wool in a dark bottle green - perfect for this particular warp.  The problem with weaving with such fine thread is that it is nearly invisible, which presents challenges, too.

Thankfully the Whitin winder is the perfect winding tool for pirns of such fine threads and even though each pirn weaves, and weaves, and weaves, I am making a dent in the bottle green.  I also have this yarn in black, navy and red which should come in useful for the 6 more warps in the queue.  Although I still have quite a bit of the singles exotics, too, so we'll see how much is left over when these shawl warps are finally history.

2 comments:

Judith said...

I admire your stash busting tenacity! I should get to work on the "cupboard of shame" myself.
You are inspiring!

Cheers
Judith

Rhonda from Baddeck said...

I love how the dark green is maintaining the vibrancy of the turquoise. Mmmm!