In my quest to get as many things woven for the County Fair as possible, coupled with a desire to use up stash yarn, I wove a woolen shawl using Mountain Colors yarns http://www.mountaincolors.com. The warp yarns were purchased as a knitted shawl kit many years ago. The yarns included Mountain Goat (worsted), Merino Ribbon, Wooly Feathers, and Mohair in the Sierra Colorway. (I chose not to use the Moguls yarn, also included in the kit. It had very large bumps that didn't seem to lend themselves to this project.) For the weft, I used another Mountain Goat yarn in the Yellowstone colorway.
The warp yarns were wound in "stripes of texture". Some sections used all four types of yarn or just two or in a few cases, just one - depending on how much yarn was left as I wound the warp. It was sett at 10 epi, which seemed to be a good compromise for the sett of all of the different yarns. The warp was threaded to a straight threading on 8-shafts.
Since the colors were so close in value and color - even the weft versus the warp, I decided to keep the structure relatively simple. I wanted to use a twill in order to increase the drape of the final shawl. So I used my standard 3-2-1-1-1 tie-up and wove it as threaded.
The weaving turned out to be slow and somewhat painful. The mohair was a slight problem, getting twisted with the yarns on each side. (Neither the mohair nor the feathery yarns were adjacent to each other or themselves.) The Wooly Feathers yarn was so attracted to it's neighboring yarns that it took about 10 minutes to weave each inch. I had to clear each shed before I could throw the shuttle. I'm pretty sure that I am not going to use this type of yarn in a warp again.
I twisted the fringe before wet finishing it. This proved to take a fair amount of time too.
The final shawl did turn out to be very nice. Although nervous about the wet finishing, I washed it in my front-loader washing machine on the handwash setting and lay it flat to dry. The yarn got cosy with itself rather than actually fulling.
I'm pleased with the result and I hope to weave more shawls with wool yarns in the future.
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| Warp Yarns |
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| Weft Yarns |
The warp yarns were wound in "stripes of texture". Some sections used all four types of yarn or just two or in a few cases, just one - depending on how much yarn was left as I wound the warp. It was sett at 10 epi, which seemed to be a good compromise for the sett of all of the different yarns. The warp was threaded to a straight threading on 8-shafts.
Since the colors were so close in value and color - even the weft versus the warp, I decided to keep the structure relatively simple. I wanted to use a twill in order to increase the drape of the final shawl. So I used my standard 3-2-1-1-1 tie-up and wove it as threaded.
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| Drawdown |
The weaving turned out to be slow and somewhat painful. The mohair was a slight problem, getting twisted with the yarns on each side. (Neither the mohair nor the feathery yarns were adjacent to each other or themselves.) The Wooly Feathers yarn was so attracted to it's neighboring yarns that it took about 10 minutes to weave each inch. I had to clear each shed before I could throw the shuttle. I'm pretty sure that I am not going to use this type of yarn in a warp again.
I twisted the fringe before wet finishing it. This proved to take a fair amount of time too.
The final shawl did turn out to be very nice. Although nervous about the wet finishing, I washed it in my front-loader washing machine on the handwash setting and lay it flat to dry. The yarn got cosy with itself rather than actually fulling.
I'm pleased with the result and I hope to weave more shawls with wool yarns in the future.
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