Stripes and Squares Scarf

On this pair of scarves I am weaving specifically to sell on Etsy, so having a variety of scarf styles is very important to the look of the shop. Periodically I have a look at the overall appearance of the pages and try and spot any colour or style voids. Right now I seem to have a need for black and for stripes.

With that in mind I pulled a 2/8 tencel warp that has stripes in the following sequence 8 black, 2 slate grey, 2 blueberry, 4 silver, 2 white, 3 lemon drop and then the reverse. When I move into the next stripe I don’t double the number of black ends. The scarf has 5 stripes in total for a total of 163 ends which ends up as 6.8 inches wide.

I think it looks really neat over the back beam!

The weave structure is modified twill with some of the ends duplicated in the pattern.

Next to decide on the weft colour, after trying some of my other options; slate, black, navy and white….I chose this lovely grayed lavender. My goal was to make the first scarf fairly light coloured and to not hide any of the colours in the warp.

I have woven this pattern before with a different treadling and colour pallet. I found that if I wove long runs treadled 1-2-3-4 it produced stunning hills and valleys that gave an optical illusion but came with a price. Even after extensive wet finishing the weft threads tended to slip on the warp threads due to the smoothness of the tencel!

Needless to say, the scarf couldn’t be sold and I’m thankful for that because it is my very favourite to wear, warts and all it has a wonderful drape.

What I did discover is that if I treadled it in short runs the warp/weft was very stable, so here is a close up!