Rayon Chenille

 There is a yarn available to handweavers called 'chenille'.  It comes in different fibre contents - acrylic, cotton and rayon - even silk - and rayon chenille has become a staple for many handweavers.

Acrylic chenille is very...stiff...mostly, and can feel very prickly.  I have woven with it and it just doesn't compare to rayon chenille after wet finishing.

Cotton chenille is also stiffer than the rayon, but I have used it to good effect in certain circumstances.  For example:

The jacket was woven in a honeycomb with the cotton chenille used as the outline yarn to frame the cells.  I chose cotton over rayon for this garment because cotton is more resilient and I knew it would wear better.  In fact it worked so well I used this jacket as my go-to travel jacket for many years.  So many that I wore the nap off the chenille around the neck and the sleeves were showing a bit of wear as well.  :)

But there is nothing quite like rayon chenille for weaving a cloth with incredible drape and a luxurious nap, like velvet.

But what IS chenille?  The name tells you when you understand that chenille is based on the French word for caterpillar, and that is pretty much what it looks like - a furry 'worm'.

It used to be woven (long story) but now it is spun and if you were to magnify a strand of spun chenille it would look a whole lot like:

Yup.  That's a bottle brush.  

Some people describe chenille as a skinny thread masquerading as a fat thread.  Because if you did a ruler wrap to see what the epi should be and went by the thickness of the yarn based on the bristles, you would wind up with a very sleazy cloth.

The bristles do nothing to add stability to the cloth, so you have to concentrate on the core yarn that is holding the bristles in place.

In a 1450 yyp rayon chenille, the general consensus among handweavers who work with rayon chenille a lot is to use 16 epi and then beat it in firmly (about 14 ppi in my experience).  It's really hard to judge ppi, so I counted picks, then measured how much I'd woven to determine the 14 ppi.  Others may vary.  And of course the width of the cloth may also affect ppi.

Why so tight?  Because rayon chenille will 'worm' or migrate and can eventually inch its way out of the structure of a looser cloth forming loops that will twist back on themselves - hence the 'worms'.

Now when you cut the web from the loom it will be stiff like cardboard.  Never fear, the magic will occur in the wet finishing and the end result will be a lovely, plush, drape-y scarf (or shawl, or whatever).

My experience with cotton chenille is much less - all I can tell you is that the cotton chenille in the well worn jacket did not worm.  It did not feel plush, but then it wasn't next to my skin - the jacket is lined for ease of taking it off and on.  

I got 9 scarves off the warp I put into the loom.  I used 2/16 bamboo rayon warp at 32 epi and beat the rayon chenille in firmly although not particularly forcefully, and was pleased that it wasn't stiff as a board.  However, when I wet finished them, one of the yarns - a different brand from the rest, did something unexpected:

While the rest of the batch looked like:

So what happened?  

Dunno.

It was a different brand from the rest, so may have been spun differently.  If it had active twist in it and I added more when I wound my bobbins, it could have led the chenille to want to contract (tracking?) in an active way as the active twist in the rayon chenille overcame the much finer 2/16 bamboo rayon warp. 

I had used this colour previously, but only as small accent stripes in warps predominantly 1450 yyp (this yarn is 1300 yyp) and it behaved so this was a bit...unexpected.

Since the effect is consistent along the entire length of the scarf, I could sell it but I won't, because I can't predict how it will behave in future cleanings.  I may give it away if a friend likes the colour (and the texture). because there is nothing really 'wrong' with it.  Out of the multiple cones of 1300 yyp rayon chenille, this colour was the only one that behaved this way, even though they had been treated exactly the same.

But I'm not an expert on rayon chenille.  If you really want to dig into the topic, Su Butler wrote the book Understanding Rayon Chenille.  It is not available as a hard copy but you can purchase it directly from Su for $28.00 US.  The digital download includes 50 .wif files.  She can be contacted at:

subu at subudesigns dot com

Always something more to learn.  Always another surprise to experience.