Saturday, December 20, 2008

Still Focused

The family's head colds turned into chest congestion, resulting in whiny children and low energy for me. As a family we've pretty much abandoned all order and responsibility around the house under the guise of rest and recovery. Somehow our current philosophy ended up with Gregory and I having a loom warping contest.



Actually, Gregory started warping his loom before he got sick and stalled out. He uses some of my equipment. I wanted to weave a Christmas scarf and told him I would be taking my stuff back if he didn't get going. Somehow, that turned into a race.

I tried something new.



I tied the ends of my new warp to my old one since I wanted to repeat the last pattern I used. Gregory considered it cheating though it didn't save me too much time. Knotting all those threads took awhile.

Gregory finished his warp first so I declared a race for finishing our scarves. (I didn't bother to tell Gregory how much fatter my weft yarn would be compared to his until after he accepted my challenge.)



I used alpaca yarn from Knit Picks while Gregory used Perle cotton for both warp and weft.



I won.

In order to weave with the Christmas tree blocking my natural light source, I tried something a bit desperate.



I balanced a very expensive lamp on the top of my frail castle. It almost crashed to the floor only once and then I managed to catch it with my pinkie. Although the resulting pain stopped me from weaving briefly, my sense of competition carried me though in the end.



With the exception of the first section of the scarf where my selvages are a bit messy, I really like how the scarf turned out. I'm hoping the recipient will appreciate the warmth and ignore the rough edges on the one end. I can't wait to start my next weaving project now that I'm getting the whole selvage thing down!

4 comments:

Woven Spun said...

woo hoo...you go girl...you'll be a weaving fool in no time now.

Heather said...

Wow Deborah, you guys have really run the gammit(how on earth is THAT spelled?!) with sick kiddos and now yourself. At least it should all have run its course by Christmas. I am praying for you all.

Gingerbreadshouse7 said...

Both scarfs are lovely, I like the patterns on both of them... where did you get the patterns? Or is it one you designed?.....Nothing like a race between two people for them both to "get the job done" ;o).
Ginny

Deborah said...

Both patterns are from Heritage Yarns. One is the free "Calvary Twill" and the other is a modified twill Margaret sent to me.