Finishing a Scarf and Starting a Scarf

The plum, moss, purple and turquoise silk scarf with navy blue Tencel weft is finally finished and it's really beautiful!  We’ve had some lovely autumn sunshine so I’ve taken the final beauty shots for our Etsy store, but the photos still need some cropping.  Here are a couple of unedited shots that show how lovely this scarf is.  I hope to have the listing up in a couple of days.

I dipped back into the hand dyed silk warps and picked out a bright pink and orange warp.  This warp only has 88 ends so I need to figure the other 112 ends.  Do I do the silk in a centre stripe, or an offset stripe or break it up?  I decided to pick out the colours that I could be using first and then drape the warp over each.  I thought that I'd let that lead the design.  I pulled out various colours of Tencel and placed them along the length of the silk warp so I could get an idea of how the colours would work.  

I stepped away from them for a bit and then came back with clear eyes and tossed some colours out and rearranged some other.  I got it down to four colourways.  

There were two winners, Azure/Ming Blue and Grey Teal/Dark Grey Teal.  They both made the pink and orange pop and they kept a bright tone for the scarf, they didn’t tone down or mute the pink and orange. 

I finally decided to go with the Azure/Ming blue combination.  Next, I had to find a pattern, I wanted a pattern with a small repeat that would look good across the 88 ends of the pink and orange silk.  A tried and true classic that I just love is the network twill polka dots, perfect!

With the pattern picked, I could figure out how to place the silk warp within the scarf.  I went simple with the pink and orange silk stripe down the middle framed by the azure blue Tencel.  I have just finished threading and soon will be weaving. 

Final Garden Photos show that we are in that strange time when the summer flowers are still going strong like here with zonal geraniums (Pelargonium hortorum) and Hot Lips Sage (Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips').

But the fall colour is in full swing on this lovely cut leaf Japanese maple.  The plants are only about five feet away from each other!