And here I thought I didn't have anything interesting to say about my weaving. Then I started my next shawl. It is a variegated superwash fingering weight wool. The colors are am-ma-zing. Hot pink and green! Spring has come, and it has slapped you in the face*
*Not actual colorway name*
With a color that cool I didn't want to muddy the weaving waters with a complex weaving pattern. You probably wouldn't see it anyway. So the yarn spoke to me and told me that it wants to me a plain tabby weave. "You got it, yarn". But I wanted to jazz it up a little bit. I had just gotten done with a plain weave shawl in a different color. I started flipping through some books for inspiration and fell into the hand-manipulated section.. Leno lace, spanish lace, wrappings, Danish Medalions... so many choices! So about 4 inches into the shawl I tried them all! I thought I was going to do wrappings but tried spanish lace just for fun. Neither spoke to me. Danish medalions ended up being a nightmare, probably because I am an idiot and didn't loosen my warp tension. Leno lace and I ended up working well together. I love the process of twisting the warp threads. I love the way it highlights the colors of the yarn rather than mix the colors together in the body of the weaving and I love the way the lace stacked with two rows, 1 directly on top of the other. Here are some process photos.
How needs a pick up stick when you have a double pointed needle? Testing the lace work.
I don't even know if I own a pick up stick! And even if I did, it was probably in the basement. I wasn't going all the way down there! The double pointed needle was already in my tray. You know how it goes. It worked.
I had to work out the edges of the lace. I didn't want to have it start the lace right on the edges because I thought it would be a bit too flimsy looking. So I wanted a 1 inch buffer. One of the things I really like about fiber arts is there there is always a "problem" to work through. For this shawl it was those edges. Here is what they looked like after my first attempt:
Meh. I wanted a huge fan of the messiness of it. So I worked out a way to tabby weave those edges.
Here is the "final" lace section, with a ruler for scale because I am a good geologist. Plus I had to make sure I could reproduce that pattern on the other side! Also... a picture of my weaving companion. He is a HUGE help of course, protecting me and my studio from birds and squirrels!
