Ribbon Scarf, Shibori

I made this scarf right after we returned from The City. I just now cut the rest of the brown alpaca/merino for the fringe. Lazy!!

Anyways, I made this from 100 grams of Valparaiso from Artfibers. It is 50% alpaca and 50% merino. The ribbon, also from Artfibers, is called Zingaro. A big mass of it comes in 100 yard "bunches" and I used probably less than 20% of it.

Meanwhile...
On the Shibori front, I've now made 4 scarves. I have been trying to make them such that the silk between the resists is not crushed and wrinkled. Looking at Karren Brito's work, I can't help but notice that the folds are consistent.

I actually like the texture of the wrinkled silk, but I want to know that I can really make one of these as it should be made. Getting there.

Shibori: My New Hobby

I made this yesterday.

When I was in Jordan I discovered “Entwinements,”Karren Brito’s amazing blog, and for about a month I looked at her directions for making shibori scarves. I love the texture, and besides I can’t see turning down a silk scarf.

So I ordered 12 silk scarves from Dharma Trading. Their prices are great, and I had the scarves in 3 days.Here is the scarf on the first run through. I did not dye, discharge color and over dye. I dyed the whole scarf this awful florescent green, and then I over dyed with brown and 4 other variations of green. I wasn’t ready on my first try to give discharging a try. Perhaps next time. I have 11 scarves left over, and Miss Carousel’s birthday is soon…

The most time consuming part of this process was wrapping the pole. This is how the resists are created. I won’t restate badly what Karren Brito explains so well on her blog. Needless to say, this is the thankless part of the process.

Once the scarf was pleated up on the bias like this I added the brown and green dyes. Then I put a plastic bag over it and put it outside for a few hours to steam in the hideous SoCal heat. After that I washed it and then I steamed it again, and wrapped a towel around it and rolled it so the pleats would be squished in.The most difficult part was waiting a day for the scarf to dry. I was finished at about 3 yesterday, and I unwrapped it this morning.

And here we are.





I am thrilled with this. The resists mostly resisted the second layer of dye, giving the scarf just touches of the bright green under the more toned down greens and brown. I love it.

Myrna

Here is Myrna from WLD:



I thought, until I began knitting WLD patterns, that my torso was a tad long, but now I feel like a giant. The 3 things I have knitted from WLD are all too short in the torso. I did not use the fancy rib stitch in the pattern. The stripes are not indicated in the pattern. I knitted 4 rows dark, 2 rows light. I casted on with the light color. I made the sleeves an inch (or 2?) shorter. I think those are all of the modifications I made to the pattern.

I knitted this with Shine from Knit Picks. I used 6 skeins of the dark and 1 skein of the light. I threw this in the washer after I knitted it, and stretched it a bit on the floor to dry. I would love to knit this again in a much finer yarn.

Warpless Scarf?

Yesterday I wove a scarf using 4 of the Artfibers yarns I got last week for the warp. I made a 3 yard warp chain, and had the loom ready to go in just a few hours. I started weaving with a charcoal tencel I had left over from another weaving project, but both K and I agreed that the charcoal obscured the warp too much. We left and went to San Diego for a few days and while there K picked out a lovely cotton/linen textured yarn. I think both of us thought is was about lace weight. But when I got home I saw that the yarn was actually three strands together, like La Bohemme, and it ended up being a semi-bulky yarn.

I hope you can see in this picture how dark the warp actually is. I used a cotton tape yarn, a silk rail road ribbon yarn, a cotton yarn with a band of silver through it, and that nubbley yarn that is silver thread with cotton beads through out. I think they got swallowed up by the weft.

Where did my pretty silk ribbon yarn go?!?

So, I wove the scarf in about 3 hours, and I like it, but the weft does obscure the warp much more than I'd prefer. I wove a few inches with many other stash yarns, and none seemed to go with the warp without hiding it.
I love the texture of the scarf, but it will have to stand more on texture than the wonderful color combinations K and I selected for the piece. I'm not sure where we went wrong, but I like it a lot anyway.

Currently, Erin is the only knitting I'm working on that is coming along. I began the arm steeks before I left Jordan last month. I'm beginning the third and final pattern repeat for the body, and I'm actually learning to like working on this.

I finished knitting Myrna from WLD a few days ago. She is blocking, which will take another month in this heat and humidity.

Road Trip!

K and I just returned from a near-week road trip up north. North. Where it was no more than 71 degrees (American) during the day. Ahhhhh.

So, after weaving that scarf from the last post I wanted to go directly to Artfibers. I ended up making two trips there. As always, the store offers great yarns found no where else at what I think are darn reasonable prices. Here is a blurry picture of what I brought home:


The two skeins in the back of the picture are things I’ve spun since I returned, they just ended up in the picture. Artyarns was so overwhelming that when we stopped in at the Village Spin and Weave in Solvang yesterday, I purchased nothing. Amazing. The same lady was at Artyarns both times we visited. She was knowledgeable and helpful, though a tad anal-retentive. I wanted 100 grams of the silk/mohair from a cone that had 127 grams on it. I wound 27 grams off the ball and told her I’d take the cone. She said to me, “That’s ok, but just so you know in the future, you wind for yourself, not the store.” In other words, I should have wound 100 grams off the cone and left a cone of 27 grams for The Store. That’s just stoopid. Other than that, she was helpful and friendly, as the folks there have always been.

I want to weave another scarf with the Tesla yarn in it. K consulted and I think it will turn out as neat as the first. The only problem is that he has to drag my loom upstairs again.

More later. I’m almost done knitting Myrna from White Lies Designs. I’ve yet to find this blouse as a completed project anywhere, so I hope to contribute a picture of mine knitted in Shine from Knit Picks.