Blue Green Scarves

My sister has been pestering me to make her an Alpaca and Silk scarf. I even got dragged down to Berrima so she could show me this special green she liked — the green turned out to be emerald green.

The dyes available to me didn't come in a green quite that shade, so the Silk was space dyed in shades ranging from grass to turquoise. It was then plyed with natural black Alpaca.

If I'm warping up the loom, it seems a waste to just do one project, so I needed to spin up some more yarn. This gave me an excuse to play with the teal Qiviut I bought from Colleen at Wild Rose Fibres. While the fibre was beautifully prepared the staple length was shorter than I expected and I found it annoying to spin as it spun out much finer than I would have liked.

This left me with the question of what to ply it with. A Silk dyeing experiment, while producing an interesting result, wasn't a suitable match for the colour of Qivuit so a call to Jenny Dunn at Virginia Farm Woolworks was in order. Virginia Farm have some luscious dyed fibres in stock and a quick chat to Jenny over colours found me the happy owner of a bag of Merino/Silk blend in a lovely shade of blues and greens. Plyed with the Qiviut, it looked perfect.

Yarn lot three was the blue-green Merino/Silk blend plyed with the natural Black Alpaca.

A quick ferret through my warp yarn box produced the colours for the warp in black cotton, jade and cornflower blue cottolin.



The first photo shows the scarves just off the loom, the second shows the difference in finish once they've been washed, fulled and fringed.



The first photo is the Silk / Alpaca scarf, the second is the Qiviut / Merino scarf and the third is the Merino / Alpaca scarf.

All three scarves wove easily, but I was surprised by the amount of shrinkage in the Qiviut/Merino scarf compared to the Alpaca ply scarves. The Qivuit/Merino scarf has a nice fuzzy texture and is noticably lighter compared to the other two scarves.

The different shrinkage rated of the Silk and Merino compared to the Alpaca creeates a nicely textured, slightly bouclé effect to the finished Alpaca blend scarves.

Hopefully, this project will keep my sister from harassing me for a while.

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