Success Story: Rainbow Scarf

Last week on the blog, I wrote about the first iteration of the woven Rainbow Scarf and how it went very, very wrong. So let's turn it around and take a look at what went right the second time, plus lay out the planning process. 

The project started last fall when customers asked me to document a weaving project on the shop's Cricket rigid-heddle loom. Challenge accepted. I proposed four different colors of Sprout Sock from The Fiber Seed as possibilities and put the color choice up to a vote on Facebook and Instagram. The final winner was Rainbow in the Dark, a Dipped colorway - when put up into a twisted hank, Dipped colorways have a solid color on one half of the hank and speckles on the other side. ​

Given this wild colorway, the project needed to be simple and let the yarn do the talking. I initially thought I'd just pair Rainbow in the Dark with a skein of Noir (just plain black). As I warped the loom, though, I saw that there was a real possibility for a cool experiment in planned pooling. Planned pooling is a way of calculating how the color runs in a variegated yarn will line up (or not) according to the width of the project and the size of hook/needle/reed used. (Want more information and a ton of examples? Check out this article by Karla Stuebing in Twist Collective, and then check out the Pooled Knits group over on Ravelry.)

When I unhanked the yarn, I measured how long each color section was and ended up with about 14"/35.5 cm per section of black/rainbow speckle, with some variation due to the hand-dyeing and rehanking process. I was shooting for a longer scarf, so I decided to do a warp that would be a multiple of 14"/35.5 cm - I decided on 84"/2.13m. I also wanted to maximize the flashiness of the colorway, so I decided to make the warp 14"/35.5 cm wide - of course, I didn't write down how many ends that ended up being, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 140-150 ends in a 12-dent reed. 

As for the weaving itself, I decided on a plain-weave fabric. (Anything else in a busy shop seemed a little risky.) I wove this scarf with absolutely zero regard to draw-in or take-up or, really, any other aspect of finishing woven fabric; as a result, it's shorter than I would like. However, the color effect is so spectacular that I'm going to wear it anyway - just not in the long and loopy way that I would normally prefer. Because of how the colors on the skein intersected, there are some spectacular effects here - plaid, stripes, and pools of color alternating with pools of black that move back and forth down the length of the final scarf.  The final step in the weaving process was to hemstitch and secure the fringe... I love hemstitching. Seriously. Finishing is such an important part of the process, and I love all of the steps. To do the final finishing of the project, I soaked the scarf in cool water and Eucalan for 30 minutes, spun out the excess water in the shop washer's spin cycle, and tossed it in the dryer. 

So - what would I do differently next time? 

• I wouldn't make the warp so danged wide - I would go for only 7" wide, rather than 14". I like longer scarves. 
• Given what I know now about the tendency of Sprout Sock to plump up  when washed, I'd warp something more like 96", and I'd use my Cricket's 10-dent reed. Weaving in the 12-dent reed made an incredibly cushy fabric, but I'd like for it to drape more.
• As you may have guessed from the last blog post, I would be much more careful in my warping. I think that a more narrow warp would have solved a multitude of problems.
• I'd spend more time planning. If you're looking for a phenomenal resource on project planning and experimenting with woven fabric , Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom ​by Syne Mitchell is my new go-to book. We'll be bringing it into the shop later this spring. 

And that, gentle readers, is the story of the Second Rainbow Scarf! If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on this blog post - or if you've got ideas that you'd like to have me write about here! - please post a comment or drop me a line at Lindsey [at] stillyriveryarns [dot] com. Thanks for reading! I expect to have at least one new post up (if not two!) in about two weeks, after I come back from the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat. We won't be there as vendors, but we are going for a weekend of professional development and browsing the marketplace - can't wait to share with you then! ​