Project: Houndstooth Shawl in Merino Wool

It is no secret that I love houndstooth - - it's a beautiful pattern that is deceptively simple to make.  And if there's anything that I love more than the deceptively simple, I don't know what it is. 

For this project I chose Kollage Happiness fingering weight 100% superwash merino wool in black and lilac.  Each skein is 100g / 450 yards.  I estimated that I would require about 1050 yards of each colour, so for safety I picked up 3 skeins of each colour intending to try for a finished work that was 28" wide x 70+" long (I wasn't too fussy about the length so long as it was more than 70") using a 12-dent heddle. 

My challenges on this project came early.  My first 12-dent heddle was broken adjacent to one of the holes, something I discovered only as I was about to begin threading the holes in my heddle.  This required me to manually transfer the entire width of my warp to my second 12-dent heddle.  Many profanities were heard that afternoon, I will tell you.  Thank you weaving gods for my double-heddle setup, so that I had a backup heddle ready to go while the Nerd repaired the defective heddle. 

My next challenge was in threading the holes in my heddle.  I think that the 12-dent heddle was actually the right call for this particular wool, however it is very challenging threading my 12-dent heddle with the hook provided with my loom.  Because the hook itself barely fits through the heddle, let alone with wool, threading each hole was a challenge of wills requiring much to-ing and fro-ing, and I had more than half a dozen ends simply disintegrate as I was pulling them through a hole.  This left me with several extremely short ends amidst many longer ends, and I probably lost more than 2-3" of warp in evening everything out.

I also had 1 end come through the hole only 2/3 of the way, leaving a twist of fiber on the back end of the heddle, something I did not notice until I had been weaving for a few inches.  More cursing.  At the end of the day, however, this did not pose an insurmountable problem as I simply worked the tag end of the wool towards the back of the loom as I advanced the warp to prevent it from ratcheting up the tension on the one warp thread as it got caught on the heddle.  I can't even tell where it was in the finished piece, which is nice. 

Although I think the 12-dent heddle was the right call for this fingering weight wool it was a close thing, and I found the wool had a real tendency to stick together making it difficult to get a clean shed.  This was remedied by the judicious use of pick up sticks to help me manually force sticky warp threads apart, ensuring that my weaving errors were kept, if not to a minimum, to a dull roar. 

I didn't do anything too fancy with this shawl, just a plain hemstitch at each end with a moderate fringe, but the simplicity works for this pattern, I think.  I did add a little ceramic "M" at one corner as a signature (just in case the usual errors I included in the piece weren't enough to identify me!).

Right off the loom the finished piece was 26" x 74", and after washing and hanging to dry the shawl ended up being 24 1/2" x 72".  I was pretty happy with the length (although I do prefer longer shawls as a rule and would probably go even longer next time) and even though I had more draw-in and shrinkage than I expected on the width, I think I could happily have gone a little narrower on the width, so this was not a bad result. 

Like the baby llama, merino is another wool that sheds like a mother, but feels so soft in the hand that all is quickly forgiven.  So long as there is a lint roller close at hand, anyways!

I love how this piece turned out and am keeping it for myself.  I have rationalized that it's OK to be selfish some of the time.  Besides, my next project is a return to industrial scale tea towel fabrication as preparation for Christmas.  Those will all be given away, so everything balances out. 

New test - Log Cabin Weave and Using a Warping Board

Flush off the triumph of the hounds tooth table runner worked in 3/2 mercerized cotton yarn in red hot and garnet, I yearned to try a more complicated pattern - - Log Cabin.  I also wanted to try and use the Kromski Harp's built-in warping board rather than direct warping the loom as I had done with the hounds tooth, as direct warping takes forever (for me at least, because my warp threads keep getting tangled). 

This time I watched a very instructive video from Craftsy - - Rigid Heddle Weaving with Angela Tong.  The step by step instructions in this video helped me overcome my fear of using the warping board, and I have to say that running the yarn around the pegs was much faster than my first attempts at direct warping. 

Even better, threading the yarn through the slots from my hand was amazingly quick and easy.  I was frankly stunned with the difference in time - - I suspect that I will be using the warping board from now on. 

I followed a pattern for a Log Cabin Weave posted on Craftsy in the video Rigid Heddle Weaving - Beyond the Basics with Deborah Jarchow.  I found this video as clear and easy to understand as the Angela Tong video, and I learned a lot about working with colours from this video.


I warped up my loom with the same 3/2 mercerized cotton yarns in red hot and garnet, not necessarily because I thought these had the best contrast (they had virtually none), but because these were almost the only yarns I had that would work on my 10-dent heddle.  As you can see when the loom was loaded up and ready to go, the difference in the two colours was very subtle indeed.

I was not thrilled with the way my yarn was crossing over itself on the back beam.  The Craftsy pattern called for the following slot order, with L representing the lighter yarn, and D representing the darker yarn:

L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D D D L D L D L D L D L D L D D D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D L D 

This resulted in 116 ends, 31 pairs of D yarn and 27 pairs of L yarn.  Once the slots were threaded, I then had to rethread the heddle in the following pattern, with the upper row representing the holes and the bottom row representing the slots:


Left side of heddle      D D D D D D D D D D D D L L L L L L L D D D D D L L L
                                  L L L L L L L L L L L L D D D D D D D D L L L L D D D D


 D D D D L L L D D D D D L L L L L L L D D D D D D D D D D D D
L L L D D D D L L L L D D D D D D D D L L L L L L L L L L L           right side of heddle


It was this rethreading that resulted in a lot of crossed warp threads.  Deborah Jarchow's technique to deal with these is to push them to the back beam as the work is wound forward.  It seems like there must be a better way to manage this. 

I began following the pattern printed in the Craftsy class, and the first part of the pattern went well.  Things started to spiral off the rails quite quickly however - - I broke a warp thread, which, although easy enough to fix, was a supreme pain in the butt initially when I kept getting caught on it.  Second, it soon became clear that I could not really see the log cabin pattern at all:

There is just the merest hint of a pattern using these two yarns - - they are simply too close in shade to give the real pop of contrast demanded by this pattern. 

I see just the barest, most subtle pattern there, but it certainly isn't doing Log Cabin any justice.


And because mistakes come in multiples (at least with me), I began to lose the pattern - - the change between the first couple of pattern blocks worked fine because the pattern called for two picks of the darker colour so that both of my shuttles ended up on the same side - - when I started the next change the pattern only called for 1 pick of dark colour so my shuttles were on either side of my loom - - I'm not sure that was intentional. 


The pattern seemed straightforward enough, but I just didn't understand the colour changes and I couldn't see the colour changes, other than as the merest suggestion, so when I went off plan I had no real way of knowing.

As a test swatch, though (and only my third real project), this was still a useful exercise because I learned how to use my warping board, and I learned that contrast is everything with a Log Cabin weave.   The good news is that I finished up the sample piece quickly enough, and I am going to try the Log Cabin pattern again, only with a much more contrasting yarn next time.