Designing on the Fly

Seeing my forlorn looking loom sitting empty has finally prompted me to haul out my little black book of yarns.

As I acquire yarn, I snip off a sample and file it in my binder making a note the fibre, grist and amount of yarn.  The aim of my book was to take it shopping with me to stop me purchasing; a) a yarn that goes with nothing that I have, or b) the same yarn yet again.

Today the yarn that piqued my interest was this rayon slub yarn in milky cream with peach and soft pink areas.  Yup, this will be the yarn that’s going to be the foundation of my weave.

Looking through the book, these two Orlec yarns from Maurice Brassard et fils seemed to work perfectly.

I decided that I wanted to weave a shawl and that I wanted to feature the slub yarn as a feature line.

The Orlec yarn weaves similarly to Tencel and both are of the same 2/8 grist, so I knew that a simple twill pattern would suit the yarn perfectly.

Please click on the pattern to enlarge.
I have woven this 8 shaft undulating twill before and it really lent itself to the insertion of the slub line.  After looking at the slub I decided to use it doubled to maximize the slubbiness....is that even a word?

The pattern and the size that I chose needs 420 ends at 20 ends per inch to give 21 inches in the reed; of which 411 are Orlec and 9 doubled ends are slub.

I discovered that I was using the peach Orlec up at a rather alarming rate and at 344 ends the Orlec ran out!  I was just about finished panel #6, just 4 ends short of finishing it, when.....nope...wasn’t going to happen.

I pulled back the last 40 ends of yarn and decided to add a panel at each side of the web using the same coloured Orlec as I had intended to use for the weft, a lovely soft, sweet rose.  This will give me a total of 378 ends, so I will have a width in the reed of 18.9 inches, which is still pretty good.

Since I am using my intended weft on the warp, I’m going to use a darker soft rose for the weft to make sure I have enough to complete this shawl, here are the new and old weft choices.

The funny thing is that the lovely rayon slub that was my feature and what I wanted to use from my stash sort of faded into the background.  In all I only used 48 yards in the warp and you can’t even see where I’ve been on the cone.

Click on the photo to enlarge; this is the pattern I have ended up with and the upshot is that designing on the fly is precarious, I didn’t really embrace my intended feature yarn and the whole project will look vastly different than I intended.

 Post Script ~ As I was finishing making up the warp it dawned on me that I should really have a stabilizing selvedge on this shawl.  So I added a 4 end twill and an additional slub end and this both added width and more slub, so I’m calling it a win.  It only took four warp chains!