Woven Squares

6 Woven Squares

So, I'm sitting in my fiber room this weekend, working on a log cabin square, when I get the sudden incredible urge to weave. Suddenly I had dropped everything, dug my Weavette out of hiding, and was "warping" my little 4" x 4" square loom with a bit of hand-dyed (Blue Moon Fiber Arts), hand-spun (my own) merino and silk blend yarn. It turned out to be an interesting exercise in color and texture for me.

The yarn I started with has relatively pronounced regions of striping, and there's a good deal of contrast between the colors. (The colorway is called "Eclipse" and you can see the finished product yarn in this old post). The very first square in the bottom right corner is evenweave (as are the top right and middle left squares). After making that square, I alternated between a square with a "pattern stitch" and an evenweave square -- the idea in my head was a small blanket or pillow that was a sampler that alternated evenweave with patterned squares. Clearly the pattern stitches don't show up all that well in this yarn, but they do create interesting texture. (All the pattern stitches came out of this book).

As I watched the squares evolve, there were moments when it didn't even seem like the squares could be coming from the same small skein of yarn. It was very interesting to me to see how a striped yarn plays out in a different fabric creating process than a knit fabric.

Each of these little squares takes about 7.5 yards of yarn, and after being removed from the loom, they are about 3.5" x 3.5" in size -- which is about 12.25 square inches. I have about 663 yards from this batch of hand spun, which would give me 88 squares (1078 square inches or a blanket roughly 33" on each side) if I were to weave it all up. Or, I could just make enough of them to enclose a standard size pillow form.

This yarn is a challenge for me to know what to do with. On one hand, it's incredibly soft and I have a sentimental attachement to it since it one of my earlier spinning efforts. On the other hand, it is not a yarn that I would consider for a garment (I can in no way,shape or form, wear a garment with so much yellow in it), and it is not particularly even or tighly spun. So I will have to think on it a bit. But in the meantime, I think I need to go make another square....