Wednesday, January 13, 2010

"Weaving, Space and Yarn......"

An update on the scarf that I began weaving (from a few posts ago). It is non-existant.........it became a mat instead. Unfortunately, due to all of my problems with the color of the warp not showing through the weft, I was finally able to achieve success with that by re-plying my black hand spun yarn. I started out with 2 ply, then plied that onto itself to try it as 4 ply, and when that still didn't work, I plied that onto itself, creating an 8 ply! As you can imagine, the yards and yards of 2 ply had become much less through this process, and to be truthful, the 8 ply still wasn't thick enough to allow the colors of the warp to come through as I had hoped. My next move with this was to add a strand of some commercial Alpaca yarn (there went my all hand spun yarn woven piece) that I had on hand in my stash, and that did the trick. The warp color shown through like a beacon! I wove this until I ran out, which unfortunately, was fairly soon, so as I mentioned, I now have a nice mat. :) In reality, due to the thickness of the now 2 strands of weft, it was too heavy to be a scarf anyway, so as the saying goes, "when given lemons, make lemonade"! It was a great learning experience and I am happy that I did it. I will post photos of it soon. I took off the remaining warp and plan to re-use it another time, but for now, I needed to make space in the front room (studio) for my "soon to be arriving" CIRCULAR SOCK MACHINE! Yes, I have not written about it until now, but it should be arriving this week or early next week. I ordered it from Jacquie Grant of New Zealand Auto Knitters, NZAK for short. http://autoknitter.com/ I am extremely excited about this machine........even to the point of waking up and not being able to go back to sleep due to thinking about it. All in good time though, yes? ;) Of course, I will be posting photos of it when it arrives, along with my "attempts" at knitting on it. I know there is a HUGE learning curve that comes with this machine, but feel I am up to the task (or so I hope!). ;)

So, the small floor loom was put back down into storage for awhile, giving me some more room (which as you can see in this photo, is needed) to set up the sock machine. I've already ordered some cones of yarn and am now realizing that more storage space is needed for those! LOL Oh, the tangled web we weave....no pun intended! ORGANIZATION IS THE KEY! I know I can do it....I know I can do it.....I know I can do it..... LOL


I also started knitting a scarf using some of my hand dyed, hand spun lambs wool yarn, but unfortunately, I didn't feel it had enough color variation for the pattern I want to use, so I ended up unraveling it and will use it another time. I found some commercial yarn to use instead this time.


1 comment:

Molly Bee said...

My goodness you're a busy boy! Can't wait to see your progress with the sock machine!