One of my first stops after getting to our cabin in Michigan was the great local yarn shop in the village of Beulah, the Yarn Market. To make way for new yarn coming in, the shop owner Michele had put a lot of things on sale, including a lot of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk that was 30% off. I can never resist yarn that is on sale. I had been thinking about weaving some scarves, so this looked perfect.
However, I also could not imagine doing scarves just in a plain color, so I gravitated to some handpainted silk that was about the same weight, but of course it was not on sale. I ended up getting some beautiful pale green Debbie Bliss, and a skein that was the same green painted with pink and slightly darker green. I also bought another whole set of Debbie Bliss to coordinate with a large skein of painted silk and cashmere yarn in orange and gray, but that’s another story. Of course by the time I had coordinated the Debbie Bliss on sale with painted silk that was not on sale, I had wiped out the savings–but I was very happy with the combinations.
In my previous encounter with skeins of plied silk yarn from Japan that was a very similar weight, I had spent a long evening making balls of the stuff, which kept snarling and knotting on itself. This time I read a hint online that said to try to wind the warp directly from a swift. Well, I don’t have a swift at the lake, but my warping board hangs in my little office, and I discovered that the arms of my office chair were just the right distance to hold the skeins. It was a little awkward, but it worked just fine. I even used it to wind the bobbins.
I planned a four yard warp 10 inches wide at 12 epi. I first did the painted yarn, and was able to get three stripes out of the skein, and then filled in with the plain light green. I wanted some sort of warp floats to show up the pink in the stripes, but I had no weaving books at hand to consult. Some digging around the Handwoven magazine website turned up an article by Tracy Kaestner called “Colors from the Masters” draft for turned Ms and Os. It was for a silk scarf using much finer yarn, but I thought the threading would work.
At the time I did not understand why it was “turned” Ms and Os, but later discovered that a normal Ms and Os threading does not produce a true tabby, but this turned one did. It is also “turned” because the floats are warpwise, while for regular Ms and Os they are weft-wise. The two blocks are 1-2-1-2-1-2 and 3-4-3-4-3-4. I did them in groups of eight for each block and it came out perfectly even.
When I began weaving I wasn’t sure how big to make each block, but after a bit of experimenting I ended up with six picks of each of the four treadlings that make up a complete unit of the two blocks: 13-14, 23-24, 13-23 and 14-24. Rather than treating my intiial experiments with 8 pick and 4 pick alternatives as sampling, I just remembered what I had done and repeated the same sequence in reverse at the end of the scarf.
Closeup showing the turned Ms and Os weave that highlights the pink in the stripes.
I made one scarf 72 inches long and realized that if I did not leave enough warp to tie on another warp in the same threading, I could make a second, shorter scarf. By that time I was already thinking that I would hold off on the orange and grey yarns and do them in an 8 harness block twill after I get home to my countermarch loom. So I happily wove a second, shorter scarf that used up all the remaining warp. If I had planned better in the beginning, I could have made two scarves the same length, instead of one long and one short one, but they’re both long enough to work.
Two silk scarves hanging from the frame of my cedar swing.
I had to make a quick trip down to the Yarn Market to get two more skeins of the light green silk–a luxury I usually do not have in Honolulu where I work with yarns I have brought home from my travels. I ended up using only one of the extra skeins, which prompted another trip to the yarn store to trade the full skein for an extra skein of the orange that I’m taking home with me.
As I was weaving and enjoying the beautiful color combination of pale green silk with little splashes of pink, I suddenly realized that it was the color combination of my wedding, over forty years ago. For the bridesmaids’ dresses I had bought Jim Thompson silk in Thailand that was woven with green warp and pink weft (or vice-versa) so that it shifted color as the fabric moved. The silk did not photograph very well because the color shifts looked muddy, but it was beautiful when you saw it in person. The bridesmaids carried bouquets of pink miniature roses on silver Japanese fans, with pink and green ribbons, as I recall.
The silk scarves turned out well. They are firm but have a nice, supple hand. When I took them off the loom I discovered some places on the back side where one pick had skipped sections. At first I tried snipping the loose yarn at one side and dutifully needle-weaving it back in across the row, but then I discovered that if I just snipped it out completely, it was less noticeable and of course much easier to do.
I twisted the fringes, then tied them together with a piece of scrap silk yarn and washed the scarves gently in Ivory dishwashing liquid. I laid them out flat on towels in the living room, where we’ve been using the fireplace quite a bit. In 24 hours they were dry, and I later steam pressed them with a handkerchief as a pressing cloth.
[...] had more success combining some pale green Debbie Bliss Pure Silk with a skein of silk that had been handpainted in l…. I used the painted silk as warp stripes interspersed with the solid green, with more solid green [...]