I am finding that as I work through various projects, weaving is less intuitive than I expect. My most recent set of projects is a perfect example. This fall my wonderful husband took me for a romantic weekend to a Black Mountain bed and breakfast. In addition to good food, lovely accommodations and a small festival in Asheville, we also spent a day at SAFF (Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair). I got some yummy tees water and mohair locks that I will put on my blending board shortly. My other purchase was not actually animal fiber, but a beautifully dyed rayon skein. I wish I’d taken a picture before I worked it up, but…

I wanted the lovely gradient to take center stage when I wove with it, and I wasn’t certain which weft color would enhance the gradient most, so I did something I probably don’t do enough, I sampled. But before I sampled, I made an assumption, one that you will see in a moment, was dead wrong. I assumed that a loose sett would show off the warp better than a tight sett. My first piece was woven at 10 ends per inch (EPI).

I tried a number of colors and weight of weft in both plain and twill weave. In the end, the very fine peach silk blended best in plain weave. With the sett so loose, twill wasn’t really an option; it left the floats too long.

After finishing this narrow scarf, I had quite a bit of the skein left. While I was happy with how the colors looked in the scarf, the weave on this first scarf was too loose and it was not a very stable fabric. I decided to try again with a denser weave. This one is twice as dense at 20 EPI. Here is where we get back to my failure to intuit how the fibers would interact in these pieces! The weft almost completely disappeared in this scarf. You can see the two weaves below, with the denser weave on the top. Both are plain weave.

After the second scarf, I only had a few lengths of the gradient yarn left, so I decided to use it as an accent in a silk scarf made from the yarn I had previously used in the weft. Having worked a twill scarf in this weight before, it came out much closer to my expectations. There’s nothing like experience.

This scarf is a little stiff coming off the loom. I suspect that it will be softer after it has been washed, but some might value the crispness, so I think I will leave it to the eventual owner of the scarf to decide if they want to wash it. I’m not sure who that’s going to be yet. I might see if it’s worth putting it up for sale. We’ll see!