Weaving -- why it rocks

Not-quite-intentional pooling scarf

With two skeins of fingering weight yarn, you can take a couple of weeks and knit a pair of socks. You can take approximately the same amount of time and knit a scarf. You might be able to eke out a shrug. But again, all of these things will take several days, if not weeks, of careful work.

In two days (one day to warp, one day to weave), I made an entire scarf. And it's gorgeous and intricate and lovely and squishy and everything you'd want out of a scarf!

Shown above is the first few rows of weaving. You may notice that some of the lines of weaving "pop" out over the others. These are called "floats". You can have warp floats (the ones that go up and down through the weaving), or weft floats (the ones that go back and forth across the weaving). And in fact, when you make a warp float on the front, you automatically make a weft float on the back of the cloth. Pretty cool.

These floats make for some texture in the cloth. In addition, you can play with color.

I played with color inadvertently. I'd planned a 3-yard warp and began to string my yarn out when I immediately noticed that it was "pooling". That is, color repeats were stacking up so that each color lined up next to itself in successive strands of yarn. Once I saw this happening by accident, I took steps to make sure that it continued to occur. There were several "breaks" in this yarn that I probably wouldn't have noticed when knitting. But they changed the color sequence, so it showed up immediately against the rest of the warp. I broke the yarn on purpose and realigned things to match.

One of the other amazing things that happens to weaving is how much it changes once washed. You can see on the first picture a very taught, even bit of fabric. But it is being held under significant tension. When you wash this weaving, the yarn relaxes and bends, snugging everything into place. At that point, you have a completely different (and still beautiful) beast.

For the nitty-gritty details of epi, draft, length, width, yardage used, yarn stats and some other pictures, please feel free to drop by my Ravelry Project Page for the Texture Scarf.