Hmm... I feel a new project coming on

These three spools of cotton have been staring at me for the past few weeks. I quite fancy weaving a dog tooth table runner for my dining table - albeit the table is in storage at the other end of the country.

I'm supposed to be doing things like painting the house at weekends but all work and no play make Lottie a dull girl. So we shall see...

Cheerful autumn scarf

Last week I took a week off work and as we weren't able to go on holiday I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to play with my new toy and get lots of weaving done. Of course, things don't always turn out how you imagine but I did manage to squeeze in a short scarf project. Short in both senses - the turnaround and the length of the finished article itself!

A little while ago I bought 3 balls of quite coarse knitting wool. I find that whenever I spot a lovely wool in a knitting shop they don't tend to have quite enough in stock of the one I want but it was so cheerful that I decided to buy it anyway.

I used one and a half balls on a warp:

In the absence of my warping board (it's in storage) I had to improvise and used the loom to make the cross and positioned my bench at the other side of the room to wrap it around. Quite why I ended up making it virtually on the floor I don't know as it involved a lot of crawling from one end of the room to the other.

I then used the remaining wool on the weft. I decided on a waffle pattern in the end as I wanted to see how well the coarse wool would make the 3D texture compared to cotton. You can kind of see the effect while it's still on the loom:

Here's the finished piece - quite short but fab colours for autumn! Not convinced the waffle effect turned out well but the fabric does have a nice texture and I guess it would be warmer than if it had been a flat texture. I'm so pleased with my new loom - it's so fast in comparison to the table loom I used before. I'm constantly amazed at how much I can achieve in one sitting.

Finished alpaca scarf

A couple of weeks ago I finished the test scarf project that I started and here are the pics. It uses a beautiful soft alpaca wool - cream colour in the warp and a blue weft. The blue reminds me of a hotel on the south Cornish coast - they have a very similar colour dotted around. It's such a smart fresh colour.

The pattern is a sort of windmill shape which you can see quite well on this photo on the loom...

...and below you can see it clearly on the close-up too although in real life you need to kind of let your eyes go out of focus to spot the pattern.

Here's a final pic of the finished article and one of Margot modelling it.

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out - at least I understand the loom an awful lot better now! Although I did make a mistake on the threading and of course it's replicated throughout the whole scarf. Still, on to the next project!