Completed: November 2015
This summer I made my first-ever in-person trip to the Webs yarn store in Northampton, MA, where I bought two skeins of Zen Yarn Garden's superwash merino Serenity Glitter Sock yarn in Midnight Teal. It is a beautiful dark, dark blue-green color with little bits of silver glitter spun into it.
Working the pick for a row of leno |
I warped my loom with 104 ends 90" long (leaving about 18" for loom waste). I set it up for plain weave using a 10 dent heddle. It was about 10 1/2" wide in the loom, but it shrank down to about 8" when I took it off the loom.
Once the loom was set up, I wove using this pattern:
- 36 picks of plain weave
- 1 row of 2:2 leno with an open shed, starting by twisting two warps over two warps
- 1 row of 2:2 leno with an open shed, starting by twisting one warp over one warp
- 20 picks of plain weave
- 1 row of Brooks bouquet where each bouquet went over four warp ends
- 20 picks of plain weave
- 1 row of 2:2 leno with an open shed, starting by twisting one warp over one warp
- 1 row of 2:2 leno with an open shed, starting by twisting two warps over two warps
I repeated that pattern 9 times, until the scarf was about 63" long, and then did 36 more picks of plain weave, and cut it off the loom.
Two rows of leno bookending a row of Brooks bouquet |
The leno and the Brooks bouquet were both really fun to do, and a lot easier to learn than I thought. I got the leno instructions from Jane Patrick's The Weaver's Idea Book. Her instructions on Brooks bouquet were a little unclearish, I thought, so I watched a couple YouTube videos demonstrating it until I felt I had gotten the idea.
I alternated how I started my leno rows because I liked the way the leno looked when the little openwork spaces were staggered from row to row better than when the spaces line up vertically.
After I had cut it off the loom, because I hadn't used enough new techniques in this scarf already, I guess, I decided to give it a twisted fringe. I'd seen twisted fringe used in several patterns in Handwoven recently, and thought it might be good in this context. I used this video by Scott Rohr to learn how to do it.
(Frustrating) twisted fringe |
I also think the yarn I used is a little stiff to make a really soft and comfortable scarf. It might help to use a slightly larger sett, so that the plain weave isn't quite so dense.
Everybody likes Brooks Bouquet! |
The finished product |