Ink Blue Crackle Scarves

The newest warp that I have on the loom is warp of 2/8 Tencel in ink blue, a lovely rich colour.  There is enough warp for two scarves and the pattern is one of Moms original Crackle weaves called Helix Nebula, it is available for sale.  

One of my favourite parts of weaving is auditioning wefts and in this case it was surprizingly hard to find a weft that would go with the rich ink blue colour.  I tried white and silver and I also wanted to try tone on tone again after the success of the teal scarf so I tried different shades of blue Tencel, blue/purple and blueberry.   

The blues didn’t really show off the pattern, the silver looked dirty and the white was OK but I wasn’t really sure about it.  So I tried some more colours in blue this time more blue/green colours, peacock and aqua marine.    

I went with a gut feeling and chose the white Tencel.  I wasn’t really sure about it but having woven two pattern repeats I think that the pattern looks a little like snowflakes.  The eagle eyed of you may have noticed that the pattern looks a bit different from the original.  The original pattern is for a 7 inch wide scarf, I wanted an 8 inch scarf so I added extra bits to frame the original pattern.  

It is a lovely pattern to weave and it quickly wove up into a scarf.  The pattern is 6 shaft and 6 treadles which is a little unusual.  My muscle memory would sometimes have my feet reaching for treadle 8 and oops! not there. 

For the second scarf I thought gold would be a nice contrast with the ink blue.  I tried straw, gold and antique gold, they were all quite brassy looking against the blue.  

Next I tried purple, green, red and yet another blue, azure.  It can be hard to pick the right colour for weft, especially in the grey rainy months.

I went with the azure blue Tencel.  And I also tweaked the pattern to get a more elongated droplet shapes so the pattern looked a little more like raindrops, I think that there is a theme going on here.

In the last post I forgot to include Moms latest scarves, they are ruby red Tencel warp with black or iris purple weft.  They are a fancy twill pattern and are quite striking.

For Sale.

For Sale.

Final Garden Photo is the catkins on the tangled mess of the contorted Hazelnut, Harry Lauder's walking stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta').  This is the time that the tree shines, once it gets its leaves in the spring it is hard to see the twists and turns of the branches.  And yes it does produce edible hazelnuts, it is a race to see if we get them or the crows do.