Reviewing the Situation

My sample scarf was woven in a 2/24 Nm alpaca/silk blend. I have a few different colours in hand and deliberately chose two – a brown and a soft violet-purple – that are quite similar in value. The grey and blue of the woolly samples have a fair amount of contrast, so I wanted to see whether a more subtle effect would still be pleasing (and visible!)

I stayed with the 14 dent reed and, after some fiddling about, settled on sleying each group of 10 (one 5-end unit in each layer) 3/4/3 leaving no empty dents between groups. My plan is to keep each piece very simple, using one of the pattern options as a detail. For this sample I started with the brown layer on top, then used a pattern area to switch to violet on top for the rest of the scarf.

The finished scarf looks like this (and this is a much truer representation of the violet than the images above).

There are some things I am happy with:

• The yarn works well with the structure – it has enough ‘stickiness’ for the floats in the lace with a lovely sheen too.
• The similar values do work well together
• I get a scarf!

However, there are also a few things I’ve learned:

• For a scarf of this length, I need to make the colour change a wee bit nearer to the end. You can see I had to fineigle the knot to squeak the pattern into view.
• Don’t use the steam when pressing: the jets go right through the holes and make them look huge!
• I may also need to tinker with the selvedges. It’s a bit tricky as I have no spare shafts, so the selvedge ends get switched along with the blocks. The answer may be to designate one colour as the ‘selvedge colour’. I could use a floating selvedge, but I’m not sure it would really help.

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with the experiment.

“Reviewing the Situation” was posted by Cally on 25 June 2015 at http://callybooker.co.uk