A Wonderful Christmas Present and Now a Scarf

My daughter gave me a wonderful Christmas present this year: a trip up to Solvang to the Village Spinning and Weaving Shop. Last year, I had borrowed a car and gone up there by myself, and later blogged about it. This time other family members took Baby Abby for the day, and Laura  drove me up to Solvang. We went the normal way straight up Highway 101 this time, not the backroads way through the Indian Reservation that Mapquest sent me on a year ago. I had a general sense of how to get there, but we used the GPS on her cell phone after we got past Santa Barbara, to make sure we turned off on the right road.

Her present included $75 worth of yarn. I figured I would go over the $75 limit, and would use her gift for the fun yarns and my own money for the basics. I had a wonderful time poking around and checking everything out. Last year my main mission was to buy temples, but this time I wanted to get some bamboo yarn to use as warp for scarves. They have Bamboodle, which is just the right size for me because it warps at 12 epi. I got a large cone of Safari, a pale beige that I had used earlier with Noro sock yarn to make scarves. Before I just had a mini-cone of it, which barely made a 4 yard warp. Now I wanted to have a more generous stock of it as a basic warp color. I also wanted to get some small cones, but first I needed  to find some interesting weft yarns to go with it.

Warp chain and bobbins for the red scarf at left, and the cone and ball of yarn for the purple one at right.

At the time I was still thinking about the Handwoven weaving with sock yarn contest, but I wasn’t really interested in the standard sock yarns. I found some balls of Mini Mochi, which has long color transitions similar to Noro, but in more subdued and limited color ranges. It is the weight of sock yarn, and is machine washable merino and nylon. I selected one ball of a red-brown range and another in purples and other dark shades,and found mini-cones of Bamboodle that would go with them. I only bought one ball of each color of Mini Mochi, which looked like enough for one scarf. Only later did I remember that my Noro sock yarn was twice as big a ball, and that I had made two scarves on my Bamboodle warp before.

Then I found my real trophy: a beautiful handpainted skein of silk yarn in turquoise, blues, and greens. The tag said “Avalanche” and I later discovered that Avalanche is the name of pure white silk sold by Halcyon and Henry’s Attic. That was the yarn that had been handpainted. I bought a couple more mini-cones of the Bamboodle to go with the silk yarn, though I do not know if I will end up using them together.

This is the luscious skein of handpainted Avalanche silk yarn

Laura used her cell phone and Yelp to pick a Panini place for lunch and then a place to get coffee. We stopped at the bakery to get an apple strudel–last year the dogs had stolen the one I bought! We had time for lots of leisurely conversation and got back to Thousands Oaks in time to catch up with the rest of the family for dinner.  This time we put the strudel on top of the refrigerator! I felt a bit guilty having Laura do all that driving on her brief vacation, since she has to commute over an hour to work every day, but she was fine with it. All in all, it was a terrific Christmas present with lots of fond memories.

This past week I warped the loom with the red Bamboodle called Lipstick, to make the first scarf. Because the Mini Mochi yarn has color transitions similar to Noro, I  wound the whole ball onto four bobbins and carefully laid them out in sequence so that I could use them in reverse order and keep the color transitions right across the four bobbins. When I started the weaving, I thought that it was too open, so I started experimenting. One of the two skeins of fine mohair and silk that I had bought in Berkeley was just the right shade of rusty rose–the label called it Vermilion. It is a lace weight yarn, so it didn’t add much thickness. I tried doubling it, but still was uncertain. It was fairly late, so I decided to wait until morning and figure out what to do when I had good daylight to see the colors.

Here are the yarns for the red bamboo and Mini Mochi scarf, with the skein of mohair and silk.

When I came back to it the next morning, I remembered that I had wet-finished my scarves. I didn’t want to waste any of the Mini Mochi by making a sample, since I thought I would have barely enough for one scarf. Instead, I cut off a length of the Mini Mochi, the mohair, and the Bamboodle, cut each length in half, and then washed one half with a little liquid soap and dried them. To my relief, both the Mini Mochi and the bamboo warp yarn bloomed–the Mini Mochi fluffed up to about double its thickness, and both yarns softened up. Only the mohair seemed unchanged, but that didn’t matter. It would work using single strands of Mini Mochi and the mohair together.

I decided to do the scarf in my usual 2-2 twill, so I pulled out the end warp thread on each side and turned it into a floating warp so the twill selvedges would stay neat. But now that I was through fiddling, I needed to wind bobbins that combined the Mini Mochi with the fine mohair. Since I had already wound all four bobbins and had the color sequence right, I had to unwind one bobbin at a time, and then rewind it with the mohair. I did just the first bobbin so I would not get them mixed up. However, even though the mohair was really fine, it did thicken the yarn and so I had to wind part of it onto a second bobbin. I then started weaving with the first of the rewound bobbins. I thought the color transition was a little abrupt when I started on the second smaller bobbin, but it wasn’t until I went to rewind the next bobbin that I realized what had happened.

I had rewound the bobbin correctly to preserve the color transitions, but when it expanded onto two bobbins of the combined yarns I had forgotten that I needed to start with the very end of the yarn, meaning the second of the rewound bobbins, not the first! Oh well, it wasn’t a very abrupt color change, and no one will notice it but me. I have now rewound the second one and am starting with the correct one this time.

A closeup of a very red part of the twill scarf. Can you see the halo of mohair?

The scarf is weaving up nicely in twill, and the fine mohair blends with the warp thread to soften the overall effect of the weft colors. Since it is mohair, I tried brushing it on the loom, the way I do with much thicker mohair in my mohair shawls. It produces a fine halo of mohair, and I am hoping it will still be there after I wet finish the piece.

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