Mohair Shawl or Throw Part 1

We came back from Croatia last week and I’m finally back in the groove.  It seems that every year older I get  a day is added to my recovery time!  We traveled to Croatia with a US based tour group called Road Scholar and I cannot say enough good things about them. We also traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, so I really feel we got a good view of the Balkans!  My general take on this area is ‘beautiful but troubled’.

When I left in September I was just putting a mohair warp on my loom, I had just picked up some lovely colours at a retiring weaver’s sale.

Don’t the yarns look lovely all wound onto the shuttles? This is my very first mohair warp and I would suggest that if it is your first time using this fibre that you ask lots and lots of questions as it can be quite a difficult fibre to use.

The first great piece of information that I got was to use a dummy warp if you are going to do multiple projects due to the cost of the mohair ~ it is a little spendy to waste.  Since multiple projects is my plan this meant pulling a 2/8 cotton warp of 180 ends, 1 yard long.  I pulled the dummy warp onto the loom, threaded it and sleyed it at 8 ends per inch. It is a bit hard to see the dummy warp but, it’s there!

I knew I wanted to do a plaid shawl/throw, so I pulled the mohair warp ends in very small bouts of 20 threads.  This really helped when I was tied onto the dummy warp.  Trying to handle huge groups of such sticky yarn would have been a nightmare.  I held the cross together with two pens that I bound together with elastic bands; these were small enough and light enough to hold in one had while tying on.

Here it is all tied on and pooling on the floor, next job is to pull it through the reed and heddles

Tying each knot on individually is time consuming, but oh so pretty when it’s done.

I did as much on line and in person research as I could and found that the general range for sett is 6 to 8 ends per inch.  I chose to sett at 8 ends per inch because 6 ends per inch was just too loose.  As soon a I had the mohair beamed I knew it was too close a sett, so I un-sleyed the reed and re-sleyed at 6 ends per inch.  Almost ready to weave!

I lashed onto the front beam, again to save the  warp length and to reduce loom waste.

We got back from holiday to find that out 4 year old Samsung dishwasher refused to start!  The new Bosch 800Plus is slipping into place right now.  We had bought all Samsung appliances when we bought this new house just 4 years ago and this is the third Samsung appliance we have replaced.  Really, really don’t recommend that brand.