Happy Birthday to Me

Hey, it's my birthday! We won't talk about how old I am. :)

I got a nice early birthday present last night - a lovely customer bought two of my scarves! The Un Poco Caliente full-size scarf, and the spring green and yellow scarflette (sorry, Mum, I know you loved that one).

I'm also in the midst of experimenting with differential shrinkage. First, I tried a doubleweave scarf (two layers of cloth, basically) woven with 18/2 merino wool and Bambu 7 (inspired by the similar double-weave scarf in The Best of Weavers: Fabrics That Go Bump), just as a starting point. I fulled it - the idea being that the wool yarn shrinks, the bamboo yarn doesn't, and you end up with ruffles - and it came out pretty good! A bit too heavy, in the end, for my taste.

So, then I tried just a normal plain weave scarf, instead of doubleweave, still using the 18/2 merino wool (sett very loosely) and Tencel as the non-shrinking fiber. This came out much better!

Here is is before wet finishing:



And, here it is after wet finishing (sent it through the wash twice, actually):



It's kind of hard to see, but not only did the Tencel get all nice and pucker-y, but the white merino at the edges have a nice little scallop to them as well. Neato!

It's too short (it shrank by about 50% in length) and too fat (didn't shrink as much width-wise, which makes sense, I used white Tencel as the weft), so I'm trying again with different colors, but I'm completely tickled! How fun!