Weaving: Bust your Stash with Louise French

 

Louise French's Finished scarves with warp sample

We all have the basket or closet of leftover yarns from other projects, too pretty to toss, not enough yardage to complete an item. What can you do?  Lou French conducted a hands-on workshop doing just that. Our instructions: choose a colorway and bring any type, size, or texture fiber (8 feet or longer) that work together and bring others you'd like to share. Most variegated yarns work wonders allowing a pop of unexpected color as you weave.  And now what? 

Using these yarns

Her novel approach uses table side warping pegs, grab a fistful of fibers (5 at a time) and start to wind your warp, after a few wraps, drops one and tie on a replacement yarn, and continue to wind your warp. You continue this process until you reach the number of warp threads desired for your width and dent requirements.  You select a weft, also from your stash and preferable not variagated and begin weaving. Varigation in the weft often makes for cloudy or dull sections in the scarf.

The resulting warp using the above yarns

The final product

Nita's scarf

And So it began. The first scarf completed is wool

and silk, used various grists (5-2 to 10-2) and textures.
This scarf definitely shouts FALL and does so exquisitely.

Nita's scarf upclose

Terry's scarf

Terry's scarf upclose

Using a similar colorway and finer yarns, Terry used silks, linens and blends. The light reflection off the linen lighten the colors, and you can see in the fringe, those pops of color.  The linen makes the scarf feel a little coarse, but as with  most linens, wet finishing may soften it up, and help with its drapabiltiy. What an fascinating learning experience. These are just two of the 22 people who attended this workshop. I am sure we have many more Stash Breaking Scarves to show in the future. I keep thinking...I can use my stash and make some yardage, I could use my cotton stash and make incredible towels/runners...fun awaits and all those end pieces of projects will finally leave my cupboards. I'd call that a win-win.