A Week's Vacation

I have a week’s stay-cation and my plan is to fill it with as much fibery goodness as possible. First stop was my yarn stash to see what spoke to me. There were lot’s of possibilities, but I settled on this:

Doesn’t it remind you of Monet’s Water Lilies? But there is not enough to warp up a full shawl, so back to the stash where I found this white cotton rayon blend. I don’t want white, though, but this cotton/rayon blend should dye up beautifully with Sabracron F dyes. Using my swatch book from Sarah Lamb’s workshop, I picked a blue and a green to match the Water Lily yarn, and a purple for some 20/2 silk for the weft.

It will take a couple of days for me to get all the yarn dyed. I don’t want to wait to start weaving, so in the meantime, I warped up my rigid heddle loom with a warp I’d had sitting around for a while.

This is a mélange of left over yarns: some black and purple ladder yarn, pink and purple eyelash, purple 20/2 silk (doubled), purple wool (a sample from a workshop) and some gray kid mohair from a UFO sweater. The weft is a super-fine lavender kid mohair.

Tomorrow I start weaving and dyeing.

More Leftovers

Who said that leftovers can't be wonderful!  Here's the second scarf in the leftovers project.

The warp is peacock blue Fun Fur, Trendsetter Murano railroad track yarn, and a little black sock yarn. The weft is very fine kid mohair, beat very, very gently to make an open fabric.


The resulting fabric is a little bit fuzzy, a little bit shiny and drapes beautifully.

The thing about yarn...

My most recent project is a scarf for a silent auction at my church.  I have a lot of designer yarns left over from previous projects, so my goal is to use some of them up making these scarves.  I figure that more than one large Rubbermaid tub of leftover yarns is too many.  (Don't think that I'm slacking, my stash of non-leftover yarns fills several large tubs.)

For this project I picked a couple of different yarns to mix in the warp.  And I used them up! Yes, all the way up. But I couldn't find yarn for the weft in my stash that was just right.  Time for a trip to the yarn store.

So here's the first thing about yarn.  Remember the old potato chip ad "bet you can't eat just one"?  Well, for yarn, it's "bet you can't buy just one."   Because the shop did have the perfect yarn for the weft.  And it had some really great designer yarns on sale for half price.  So I had to get some - really it was too good to pass up.

And that's the other thing about yarn.  You can never use it all up.  Because that perfect weft - half of the skein is left.  So into the Rubbermaid tub it goes.

I'm really happy about how the scarf came out.  It was soft, elegant and drapes nicely.  Buying the perfect weft yarn - even with the left overs - was definitely worth it.