Yarn Along - The Daniel Scarf

When my mother passed away this winter I inherited her weaving loom, a (now) vintage Leclerc table loom and floor stand.  I don't remember her weaving with it, but she had a good collection of weaving books and some leftover yarn, so she must have made a good run at it at some point.

Daniel's 2015 fleece went to A Yarn Well Spun last year (and 2016 this year) and she had a run of yarn spun from it.  I picked up a couple lovely undyed skeins at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival in May and as the Tour rolled around, I decided to combine it with the loom and put both to good use.

The finished scarf.

Before fulling/blocking - you know, my favorite part ;-).  

Notice how you can see each individual strand?  How almost rough it looks?  Woven cloth is not finished until it's been "fulled".  Fulling is done (at least here) in the washing machine and involves hot(tish) water, soap and a few seconds (30 this time) of machine agitation.

Notice how much softer and fuzzier and comfy it looks now?  The yarn all melded together?  You should be able to click to biggify.  Isn't that fun?

I used a fairly simple diamond twill pattern that you can only see from certain angles. Interestingly, from some angles the fabric looks like light brown and white, not just light brown.  I love that because Daniel has a few faint stripes of white mixed into his brown body, too :-).

Some mandatory blocking (where you size it and even out any uneven spots) pictures.  I used the house porch this time, but I'm going to move back to the Wool House porch next time because the table height (an actual table ;-) is more comfortable up there.  

And yes, it's a simple, straight, rectangular woven scarf (as opposed to, say, a fancy, curvy knitted lace shawl), but any time I put wool and a measuring stick together, you know there are going to be pins involved. Lots of pins.  An insane amount of pins.  I LOVE to block :-).

The cats are all pretty much self blocking these days.  No pins required.

My latest favorite spider, doing a little spinning and weaving above the red bench.  You'll need to biggify to see her.  She's quite pretty.

After several (!) disappointing book downloads, I was luckily reminded that you can never go wrong with a No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book, so enjoyed my weaving listening to the latest from Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi and Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni.  

I had a pleasant surprise in the mailbox over the weekend, too. Shepherds and Shepherding by Jonathon Brown.  It's packed full of historical shepherding information and pictures and I'm thoroughly enjoying that as well.

Joining in with Ginny...