Grey And More Grey

At the end of the last blog I had just finish the coral pink silk scarf and was waiting for some winter sunshine to come to take final photos of the scarf.  Well it finally appear yesterday and I was able to take photos but I still need to process them so next week for the final reveal.

I have started another project by dipping back into the silk stash.  There are two skeins of grey raw silk, which I was hoping to use as a weft but the more that I looked at them, there were differences.  The labels are in two different colours, but the colour numbers are the same but the lot numbers are different.

The above photo makes it look like they are very different colours but in real life they are very similar.  The best use for these skeins would be in a warp where I could interleave them so any differences would be even throughout the scarf.  The next step is onto the skein holder and wound into cheeses ready to be pulled into a warp.

The silk yarn is quite interesting with the uneven texture and the flecks of white through the grey silk.  At this point I don’t know what the pattern is going to be, I needed to pull the warp first to see how many warp ends I had to work with.

I wanted the scarf to be 8 inches wide so I added two panels of dark grey silk to the edges of the scarf, the dark grey silk is also going to be the weft for the scarf.  When I pulled the warp I pulled each grey skein for two threads and now that I’m threading I’m separating the two threads further so now one thread from each skein is beside each other to blend any discrepancies in the silk.

Originally I sett the scarf at 20 epi and as it was rough sleyed into the 5 dent reed built into the top of the castle of the Spring loom, it looked really dense.  But I kept going and I sleyed the reed at 20 epi; but it felt quite thick and tight in the reed.  So I did a quick couple of passes with the dark silk weft to check the sett and it was incredibly stiff and I worried that after washing the yarn would bloom further and create a board stiff scarf so I changed the sett to 18 epi. 

The scarf is now 8.88 inches in the reed but the hand is so much nicer.  The pattern is one that I’ve used before; it is an 8 shaft twill but it uses 12 treadles.  

The pattern looks a bit like Greek keys, I was thinking the scarf was going to look like a grey winter sky but now I’m not so sure.

Final Garden Photo is the garden gate with little muddy paw prints on it.  Proof that there is a raccoon that likes to use the top of our fence line as a route through the neighbourhood.