More Snowflakes

 

weaving draft for silk/cashmere scarves

I'm about done with the current warp, which was an interesting little tangent to go into.  But I'm about done with that highly twisted single 6 cotton, and am anticipating a very nice jaunt down the silk warp, cashmere weft bylane.

I really liked the weave structure I used with the single 6 but the twist energy pretty much erased the actual motif, and I thought it had some nice features about it, so I essentially reduced it to the number of ends I needed for a scarf warp and will go ahead with the same thing for the scarves.  

Seems like I have a whole lot of very fine (as in gossamer) cashmere in natural white.  After doing a grist comparison yesterday, I decided I am going to have to double the cashmere even to get close to the 2/30 grist of the silk.  Since the cashmere is in skeins, it seemed the best way to deal with what is a fairly 'tender' yarn, is to use it doubled and the best way to do that is to use the double bobbin shuttle.  If that doesn't work very well, I can then double it by winding from two bobbins onto a single bobbin, but before I spend the time to do that, I'm going to try weaving with the double bobbin shuttle.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that this weave structure is the 'same' on both sides - except the warp and weft change places in the motif.  The front side is a mirror image of the back.

 The fabric will have a difference one side to the other since the warp is shiny silk and the weft is mat cashmere, so the effect will be a subtle difference.  The effect when done in contrasting colours is greater, but I like the mat/shiny effect, too.  

And I have rather a lot of the fine cashmere, so I'll be doing a range of scarves using these (and other sizes) of silk.  If I run out of options to use up white, I also have rather a large amount of very fine worsted wool to use on some of the intense coloured silks also in my stash.  So I have my 'work' cut out for me.  

I don't expect to be exploring much in the way of weave structures, but some colour options.

And, in the end, weave down some of my silk and cashmere stash.  Win-win!