Spun and Woven

Hello hello! This week, I bring to you a fun project I did for a friend's birthday. (And since I know you read these, hi! None of this stuff will be news to you!). Anyway, she recently began to learn how to spin by hand, and was making yarn out of some lovely navy blue wool. The finished product was lovely, in my opinion: maybe a hundred yards of roughly bulky weight yarn. As with all first spinning projects, though, it was a bit uneven in spaces (thick-and-thin is how it's marketed, I think). Uneven yarn is a bit difficult to knit with, so she wasn't sure what to do with it.

Enter me, with my ridiculous penchant for learning as many crafts as possible. I don't much enjoy knitting with thick-and-thin yarn either, but I have learned that it's excellent for certain other crafts: namely weaving. It adds a wonderful texture to woven fabric, especially when paired with smoother yarns. I proposed an idea: I would take her yarn, add some store-bought yarns to the mix, and weave her a scarf as a birthday gift. She agreed, and so we set off to find yarns to complete the set!

Now, I mentioned before that this handspun was navy blue. This is broadly speaking correct, however it doesn't tell the whole story. The wool reads as solid blue at a distance, but upon closer inspection, it has strands of lots of different colors mixed into it: reds and yellows and greens. In order to use other yarns, they had to work well with all of the colors present. It was a bit of a challenge to find something that worked, but we eventually settled on a color palette that played to the handspun's strengths.

The leftmost yarn is, of course, the handspun. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't capture its color very well, but you can see the nice chunky texture it has. The right two yarns are the ones we picked out. The magenta was selected as a stark contrast to the handspun, both in texture and color. It plays off of some of the redder strands of fiber in the handspun. These two yarns were to make up the warp of the scarf, running in striped up and down its length. For the weft, we needed yet another contrast. I tried to find a matching color yarn that would blend in, leaving the striped as the major design element, but we had no luck with that. So instead of matching color, we settled on a very thin light grey yarn. Being a neutral, it worked well with both the previous yarns, and the thinness would make it disappear somewhat in the weave of the fabric. The sections that did show would really pop, though, adding another layer of interest to the scarf's design. Or so I hoped. Nothing to it but to do it now, eh?

After all the yarns were assembled, I got to work warping the project. Rather than simple stripes, I placed the majority of the handspun towards the center, and graded out with the magenta yarn towards the edges. I think it looks a little nicer like that. Then it was just a matter of weaving: it's all just a plain weave, so it went fairly quickly. When all was said and done, it looked like this!

I rather like how it turned out! I hadn't expected the grey weft to show up so much more on the handspun than the magenta, but it makes for an interesting design element, no? When in doubt, claim that you planned it like that all along! It's in my friend's possession now, in any case (and I hope you like it!). I really do like the texture of the handspun with weaving. Maybe I should do some more spinning and then weave with it...

Ah, but that's a matter for another week. For now, I'll take my leave. Stay crafty, everyone!