Sunday, September 29, 2013

Prizes, Yarn Uses, Finished Scarf


Robin's multi-colored cotton boucle on the loom


I follow Robin Edmunson's blog "Rurification".  She lives within a couple hours of my home and posts wonderful suggestions of ways to use the local harvest.  My favorite food thing she suggested was making chive flower vinegar.  My youngest loved our chives and was thrilled when we put the chive flowers into the vinegar and it turned the vinegar pink, her favorite color!

This summer Robin had several give-aways on her blog.  One of them was some hand-dyed cotton boucle yarn and the pattern to crochet it into a shawl.  I entered....and won the yarn!  I was excited!  I tried crocheting the shawl pattern.  It didn't make my socks go up and down.  So, I found an alternate use for the yarn.  I wove it in a deflected doubleweave piece and turned it into a scarf.  Tee-hee!  Deflected double weave gives great dimensionality to a woven piece!

This weave structure is referred to as "Marshmallows" Madeline van der Hoogt and "Cloudy Day" by the designer, Lynn Tedder.  The draft is available in Handwoven magazine, Jan/Feb 2001,p.62-67.  The squares of cotton on the scarf puff out and push in....I love it!

The concept of deflected double weave is still a bit mind boggling.  Essentially two layers of cloth are woven at the same time on the loom (that's the double weave part) and the two layers are next to each other.  Upon removal from the loom, the threads shift or deflect so they are on top of each other which creates the multi-dimensionality of the piece.   Additional interest can be created if the two layers are woven with felting vs. non-felting fibers.  A felting wool will not only deflect, but also shrink and can create amazing textures in the final pieces.

So far I've only woven two deflected doubleweave pieces, but I'm hoping to do more soon!


Just so I remember--I wound the dark purple warp threads on a fake second back beam.  I used the raddle for my Mighty Wolf to keep the purple threads separate from the variegated cotton ones.  The purple threads had a rod placed in the end loop of the warp, the rod was held next to a larger wooden stick, the the warp was rolled with paper as a separator.  I hung the sticks with the purple warp off the back beam and then added two cords with live weights (two 15oz cans of veggies vs. one smaller, perhaps 8oz, can of tomato paste for each cord).  It worked well!  Also, the dark purple threads are a recycled wool blend yarn.  It originally came to my house as a sweater dress.  I like it much better as a weaving yarn (even if I do have to ply it to give it enough strength for a warp!).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is genius. Terrific set up for a second back beam. And the finished piece is sooooo pretty!