Scarf Project!

Found a cool hand painted warp scarf project in an older issue of Handwoven magazine.  It features strips of warp you hand dye and then flip them alternately to vary the pattern.  The weft is a single color that blends will with your other colors.  The warp is sett at 30 EPI which is slightly higher than the warp yarn calls for so it packs a bit tighter and gets a bit more emphasis.

The kit from Interweave.com was $60.  I did not like the blue color combo it is offered in and when I went back to look for it the Autumn colored kit had been sold out.  I decided to DIY it.  I have dyed and stuff before, so figured this was definitely doable!

My first challenge was YARN.  There is always yarn, but specific yarns comes and go.  This project is from the May/June 2013 edition of Handwoven Magazine (pgs. 50-52).  The yarns mentioned in the original article are no longer available.  The kits currently on sale offers a different set of yarns.  When I decided to weave this project those yarns were not easily obtainable either so I wound up with a third set of yarns.

In this case the warp is thicker than the weft.  The warp is sett at 30 EPI.  This means in each inche wide of the scarf you would expect to count 30 threads (think about those 700 thread sheets you sleep on).  The weft is sett at 16PPI or picks per inch.  A pick is a single pass of the weft yarn through the warp threads.  You should count 16 per inch.

After all is said and done i think i picked yarns that will get me really close to the original.  The main trait to use for substitution of yarn is YARDS/POUND.  I have summarized the yarns below.  Please note mine came in NATURAL since we will be hand painting them with dyes.

	Warp	Weft	Yds/Lb.
Original	12/2 Silk	30/2 Silk	2950/7440
Kit	5/2 Tencel	10/2 Tencel	2100/4200
Mine	8/2 Tencel	16/2 Bamboo	3360/6720

Tencel and Bamboo are made in the same fashion using by products of processing the hard materials.  Tencel is made from the oils extracted from cotton and is a type of viscose

My hope is I choose yarns close enough to the originals to get the same effects. If anything I might not get the 16ppi but I have prepared 400Yds of warp just in case. Maybe I will use less. I am fairly new to subbing my own yarns. Next time we will talk about my color choices and how that is going. We also look at my hand dyed warp.