Fiber Monday - Getting to learn new skills

Before I jump into those new skills I got to learn, I'm going to start with my current knitting project. This is The Shift cowl by Andrea Mowry and I'm really loving how it is turning out. Frogging that ridiculous number of times early in the process was definitely worth it.


The blue is hand spun and the other colors are purchased yarn. What I'm loving the most is the subtle changes in hue in the blue. It is part of the CVM fleece that I processed, dyeing it before spinning. That is the reason for the subtle color shifts. I will remember this because I love the effect.

The blue CVM yarn.

And now we get to the reason for getting to learn new skills. I've been working on a very wide weaving project for a while now. Never have I been so relieved to get something off the loom. These blankets were troublesome. I learned how to repair multiple warp thread breaks while weaving as well as dealing with some significant tension issues. Then, after I took it off, I realized that there were multiple weft floats. This is where the weft (the going across thread) didn't go through the correct pattern of warp threads. 


See that orange thread that is sitting on top of the fabric? That's a weft float. So I got to learn how to repair them. I got a lot of practice repairing them. (I think we need to slightly adjust the shades on my loom before I weave another wide project because the warp needs to be closer to the bottom of the shuttle race making it more difficult for this to happen.) 


See all those loose threads? Each pair is a place where I repaired a float. 

After all the repairs I cut the two blankets apart, hemmed them, and threw them in the wash. After they were dry, I then needed to go back and trim all those threads and take out the floats. Even though it tended to be a frustrating process, I'm pretty happy with the results. 



They are each ~54 inches long.

This is the same side I showed you where all the floats and subsequent repairs were. I'm happy that the repairs were successful and no floats are to be seen.



I think I will go back to narrower projects for a bit to take a break.

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