Using Up the Fancy Yarns

This shawl was the culmination of  several dyeing projects and a knitting project.  Quite a few years ago, my mother bought a kntting kit for a beautiful sweater.  She was an excellent knitter, but because age was starting to catch up to her memory , she couldn't remember the pattern and finally turned it over to me to finish.  There were balls of a beautiful felted yarn left over and some of those colors were the magenta, dull lavender and darkish purple you see in the woven shawl.  I had some alpaca/wool that I dyed purple and some fine lace weight yarn that I had painted for my local yarn store and finally ended up buying myself.  The owner couldn't sell it and wanted an overdye job, but I couldn't bear to color over my lovely  purple paint job. 

The warp was done with three ends of the lace weight and one end of the heavier sweater yarn in five big stripes.  I didn't have enough of the lace weight yarn or the sweater yarn for the weft, so I dyed more alpaca/wool and some fine Merino wool.  Once I started weaving, I realized I would need more of the Merino and since I never dye to specifications, I went for an entirely different lavender - and then another magenta.  Weave, dye, weave, dye.  After all those improvisations, the shawl turned out pretty nice after all!

The draft was taken from Handweaving.net and when I originally downloaded it, it was a six shaft draft.  I converted it to eight shafts and when I went back to retrieve the draft for this post, I see that it is 8 shaft there now as well.  (Draft 41906).  The fancy yarns float on the surface of one side and are just caught up in little dots on the other side, making it a two sided fabric.

And, I finished the tied weave shawl (alpaca and painted Merino) and it's on its way to a new owner.