Once upon a Christmas I used my newly discovered mad weaving skillz to weave for my sister the Twilight Scarf.

It turned out beautifully, and is my most favorited project on Ravelry. I wanted to keep it for myself, but dutifully gave it away – and promptly bought another skein of Malabrigo Sock in Stonechat to make another for myself. A few months later I bought a second skein, thinking I would make a wider scarf for my version, and then the yarn sat in my stash for a long time while I didn’t do any weaving.

Recently I went into a furious destash mode where I tried to finish all my outstanding yarn projects, and before my current crazy work project took over my life, I made a lot of progress. In fact, I destashed down to one cone of lace-weight bamboo yarn. And I finally finished not just one, but two scarves from the Malabrigo (plus the recently posted Lace and Cable socks).

Because I bought the two skeins a few months apart, there are subtle differences in the color variegation. So you can see that the scarf on the left (the Eclipse scarf) has more of the highlight color in the weft than the scarf on the right. This makes me sad, because it turned out slightly better than the one on the right (it’s longer and the selvedges are more even), but I like the resulting fabric better on the one on the right (the New Moon scarf). Here’s the Eclipse scarf:

And the New Moon scarf:

Both scarves are 72 ends, 10 dpi reed. The New Moon scarf is about 48″ long and the Eclipse scarf is about 54″ long. In other news, Ravelry finally added weaving as a category for craft, yay!

I mentioned the low-budget Masterpiece Theater serial of Pride and Prejudice was four or five episodes, right? So in addition to a scarf for Edmond, I had time to weave one for myself.

The yarn is Crystal Palace Waikiki, a slubbed cotton-rayon blend. 60 ends, 7.5 dpi reed, finished size about 6″ wide by 67″ long.

I’m happy with the loose weave and texture on this scarf, but considering its decorative nature I could have gone with something a couple inches narrower. Still, it has a dressing-up feel to it that I like.

It’s been a crazy busy week this week, between exciting developments going on at work and in the evenings trying to finish my brother’s new company web site for launch. I think I would like to be knitting, and not trying to make absolutely positioned navigation sub-menus work across different browsers and operating systems. But, alas.

E. got Parallels working on my Mac a couple months ago, and over my time off at Christmas I began taking advantage of instant streaming on Netflix. The selection kinda sucks, but I ended up watching a low-budget Masterpiece Theater serial of Pride and Prejudice that stretched four or five episodes while I wove. Thus, ironically, my husband who dislikes Jane Austen has become the recipient of Mr. Darcy’s Scarf.

This is more of the Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport that I bought from eBay. I used leftovers from the Luna Capelet for the warp and a fresh skein for the weft so there would be continuity throughout the scarf: you can see there’s a vertical strip of a beige-y color on the left, which shows just how varied the colors are in this dye lot.

The scarf was 60 ends with a 10 dpi reed, and measures about 5″ wide by 72″ long excluding fringe.

This is my new favorite scarf. I finished it before Christmas, but hadn’t gotten around to photographing it until now. It is woven from Malabrigo Yarns Silky Merino, and it is the softest yarn ever. The finished size is 4.5″ wide by 54″ long, excluding fringe: 48 ends with a 7.5 dpi reed. I wear it to work, at work, at home. I lurve it even more than its namesake, the song “Home Life” from Rook by Shearwater—and that’s a lot.

I hope you are all having an excellent 2009 so far! I took some time off at the end of the year, and completed a bunch of projects that I’ll be posting over the next while, so stick around!

My coworker Emily wore pink today, anticipating me yet again. It’s getting a little eerie.

This is the Snow Leopard Scarf, woven on my Ashford Knitter’s Loom. 5.5″ wide, 62″ long, 36 ends at 5 dpi. The yarn is a Novelty Boutone yarn from handpaintedyarn.com. It is a wool yarn with a cotton thread wrapped around it, and little “buttons” where the cotton thread is wrapped around like a little cocoon around the yarn. The buttons proved a bit of a problem in warping, as I originally wanted to use the 7.5 dpi reed but the buttons wouldn’t fit through the holes. However, the loose weave that resulted from the 5 dpi reed came out with a nice drape, and I think it would have been a bit stiff with a denser weave.

The Snow Leopard scarf takes its name from the song of the same name on the album Rook, by Shearwater. I lurve it.

I kept going long enough to make a minimum scarf length before giving up on the broken warp threads and finishing. The final scarf is about 52″ long by 6″ wide and it’s amazingly lightweight.

This morning my coworker wore a green jacket. It’s like she anticipates what I’m bring in to show off.

This scarf is called the Mockingbird Scarf because I listened to To Kill a Mockingbird in audiobook form while I made it—penance for all the teenage vampire romance listening.

I ordered this beautiful yarn from handpaintedyarn.com a little while ago, and somehow, over navigating around the site and ordering a few different yarns, got it into my head that I was buying double-knitting weight, when in fact I ordered lace weight. I had misgivings about using it for weaving, but I was so inspired by another Ravelry member’s project with it that I decided to go for it—even after reading, on that same project, that she’d had one warp thread after another break.

Don’t get me wrong, this is beautiful yarn and I think it would make an amazing handknit lace shawl—in fact, I’ll probably knit one, since I bought another skein in a different color. But it is not meant for warping. 10 inches into my current project I have already had three warp threads break. Every time I pull the reed down I can see it shaving little bits of wool from the thin, single-ply yarn, and every once in a while just a little too much wool is gone and the warp breaks. But oh, it’s pretty! The colors are more saturated and darker than in the photo on the web site, and even with a 12.5 dpi reed the weaving is open and airy. It might even be worth all the aggravation. Maybe.

The Magnolia wrap takes its name from the album Magnolia Electric Co. by Songs: Ohia, which I listened to somewhat obsessively during the wrap’s construction. My coworker and fellow music afficionado Grant hopes that the wrap’s recipient won’t become depressed just wearing it, with that kind of legacy! But I was in love with the slide guitar and violin, the urgency of the lyrics, and the glorious fuzz of the arrangements, and the resulting album is complex enough that it requires a few listens to grasp it all. (In fact, I’m listening to it again as I write this.)

On to the wrap. I used every slot and hole in the 10 dpi reed, so I had about 120 ends (the loom is only 12″ wide). The yarn is Alice Starmore Scottish Campion, a 2-ply sport-weight Shetland yarn. My mother had purchased a bunch of it for a Fair-Isle sweater that she never got around to knitting, and gave it to me when I was home a year or so ago. There were at least 12 colors, and more than 20 skeins—I had one to four balls of each color. These are not so much my colors, although I like the heathery tones in several of them. The yarn is loosely spun and I was able to break it easily by yanking on it, so I worried that it wouldn’t be strong enough for warping, but it held up. The biggest problem I had was that this yarn is prickly: the warp threads kept sticking together, and it was hard to beat. Even after the finishing wash the fabric is still a bit itchy.

I made up the plaid pattern as I was warping the loom, starting in the middle and working toward the sides. I had more of the heathery purple and the dark teal colors than anything else, so I alternated these, the deeper colors, in the larger areas to try to anchor the pattern. There is so much going on with the multiple colors that I wanted some structure to the pattern. So I used 10 ends for each purple section and 6-8 ends for the teal, and separated them with 8 mixed ends chosen from the remaining colors. I tried to limit the amount of what I considered outlier colors, like the pale yellow, to a few highlights, and stick mostly with the mid-range. When I had finished warping, I wove in the same pattern.

Since there were a lot of color changes in this pattern, I wove in the ends in each time I started or ended a color, alternated the sides where the colors started, rather than trying to carry strands along the sides. It worked out pretty well—the extra threads are only an inch or so long—but I wish the piece were wider so there was more middle area. I also wish it were wider because after taking it off the loom and the finishing wash the wrap is only 11″ wide, so it’s really more of a scarf.

Time for a new naming convention! I’ve decided to name my pieces after whatever I’ve been listening to while working on them. So this is the Twilight scarf, because I made it entirely while listening (I’m embarrassed to admit) to that goofy teenage vampire romance in audiobook form.

Scarf is about 5-1/2″ wide by 72″ long; 64 ends on a 10 dpi reed.The yarn is Malabrigo Sock in Stonechat. This is my first time using Malabrigo, and I see now what the fuss is all about: this yarn is soft! And smooth! There’s no friction at all on the loom. I had to be careful not to mash it down—the last yarn I used was Alice Starmore Scottish Campion and it kept sticking to itself, so I’d gotten into the habit of beating hard, and the Malabrigo doesn’t require that kind of handling.

I think I’ve finished all my Christmas presents now!

This is the followup to my first scarf, from my 12″ Ashford Knitter’s Loom. Like the first scarf, I used Brown Sheep Wildfoote Luxury Sock Yarn, but this time I used the variegated color (Ragtime) for both warp and weft. I like this version much better: it’s a bit darker, and the variation in the warp threads adds vertical interest to the pattern. Plus the fringe is not so pink.

I also switched to a 10 dents per inch reed for this one, so the weave is tighter. Because the Wildfoote yarn has 25% nylon, it did not “bloom” so much in the finishing wash (wool will full a bit, filling in the spaces), so I think the denser weave is better. The scarf I made after this one was 100% merino wool, and is a bit softer.