10 Shaft Free Form Scarf

I feel like I am on a very slow train lately.  It takes me forever to finish things on the loom; projects that should take a couple of days stretch into a week. Then once it is off the loom the project seems to kick around the studio for awhile before I actually get it finished.

Even though we are in a house that is under 4 years old, we are constantly making changes and the big change right now is that we are pulling up the floors from the only two bedrooms that were carpeted.  After much hunting around we finally found hardwood floor that is a close match to the dark maple floors in the rest of the house.  It seems that whatever we have; it’s out of stock or no longer made, or out of business, why is that?

So baseboards have been removed, tack strips pulled out and tomorrow someone is coming to take it all away to their home.  Then the installers arrive and we can put the rooms back together again!

That’s my excuse for showing you yet another scarf that has been woven and cut off but not pressed or finished.

This scarf came off the loom as stiff as a board.  The silk was washed after I hand spun it to set the twist, then again after the dyeing process, so I set the scarf quite closely as I had no expectation of shrinkage and didn’t want to end up with a sleazy scarf.  The warp width was 8 1/8 inches on the loom and the finished scarf is 7 7/8 wide.

The warp I pulled was 100 inches long and the scarf with fringe now measures 96 inches, so somewhere along the line I lost 4 inches.  Since the scarf has yet to be washed, I think this is take-up lost as the warp threads interact with the weft threads….but it is a surprising amount considering only 71 inches have been woven.

I love this free form pattern; the random waves across the width are truly lovely. Once I have twisted the fringe and given this a good wash I think that I’ll try whacking the scarf on the table a few times to soften it up ~ fingers crossed!

The garden shot for today is a big beautiful Dahlia from my back garden, what a looker!