And down she goes

In my last post but one I was talking about slippery slopes, wasn’t I? And left you without explaining what I meant.

I was referring to this stole I made. I had some balls of rayon that Jaishree gifted me, which were sources of amazement to me primarily because of the fact that they stayed rolled. I find the yarn so slippery I cannot manage to roll it from a hank, yet she actually wound several balls and gave them to me.

So I decided it was time to liberate them from stash. And since weaving is my new madness, they were to be woven. The yarn is very thin, so I chose to double the ends, and somehow I thought I had enough in one colour to warp across almost the entire width of the loom. So off I went with the orange, only to find it ended almost exactly halfway across. Then I had to quickly pick another colour, or risk undoing and redoing the warp, which would have resulted in almost definite destruction of the yarn, since I found even winding it on the first time quite fiddly. I finally had to poke a hole in the lid of a plastic dabba and put the balls in it to somewhat control the yarn.

I had gold as well, so the second half of the warp went golden. And the beginning of the stole too. The other colour I had was pink, and so it made the major part of the weft. I’m lucky the colours worked as well together as they did.

I was very happy, because I wanted iridescence, and I got it! This is the phenomenon where the fabric shows a different colour where it drapes in hollows and highs. This was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for some real silk yarn I spent a fortune on when I visited Silkindian in Bangalore in February. So I’m hoping it will work for that as well.

The other thing that makes me happy is that I sold the stole! To a friend who liked it enough to gift it to someone she said liked it as well 🙂

But to every summit, there is a valley. And to this one you can attach this:

While that looks harmless enough, it is not what it was supposed to be. Following my success making a double width fabric (which shall be documented later), I thought I’d try a pattern in double width. Despite spending a couple of days studying the possible threading of two heddles in two colours with Word, Excel and Pixeloom, I’m afraid I could not conquer that particular peak. I think I got the warping right after several attempts, and even managed to insert the pickup sticks, but met my nemesis at the actual weaving stage, where I could not wrap my head around the alternate coloured picks in two layers.

So, a failure. Partly redeemed by the fact that I did my first log cabin (and understood the basic logic for hopefully any sort), and that I used uncrafty materials (plastic bobbins made to wind excess power cables around) as shuttles. At 4″ long, they are quite suited for narrow width warps. Cheap and accessible.