weave4fun

Happy New Year Y'all! So I've been back at college for, oooooh, what, two weeks now, and things are going just fine. I have been doing lots of visual research and development and I have also in dribs and drabs been dressing the loom with an 1800 end warp of cotton, worsted and wool/lycra mix. The wool/lycra mix is the star of the show. This is a core spun lycra wrapped with 97%worsted wool. The brilliant thing about this stuff, in contrast to other elastic yarns I've used is that at the lycra is held at extension in the normal tension of the worsted yarn. This means it's reasonably easy to weave with, as it basically behaves like a normal worsted yarn when it's under tension, which is FANTASTIC. The really interesting thing as well of course, is that the lycra doesn't properly relax until it's been washed in a relaxed state, at which point it obeys it's true desires and pulls itself right in all scrunchy like. The idea is I'm making cloth ...

Yes, definitely worth the effort.

so I made a warp up of 1/15 worsted. And I did it in plain weave and 4-shaft honeycomb in both 24 and 32epi. The plain weave was better in 24 (more balanced and less sticking, which reminds me I really should learn to make and apply warp sizing to stop that from happening, it makes weaving plain weave in wool a real pain in the backside) but the honeycomb was better in 32, cos it's more weft-faced, innit anyway, here's a pic of the 2. Both quite nice, I'll have to give it a go in the cashmere next week sometime, see how that goes. And this ugly duckling on the right is the cashmere, after going through the wash (big mistake). See, I've been hoping to be able to weave multiple scarves in a single width, but due to a lack of proper finishing equipment, this is proving somewhat unlikely. Also, for some reason, the blue weft yarn in this scarf is shrinking and felting more (much more) than the white. Which doesn't make a lot of sense because they're from the ...