Pillow Talk

Here is what I did with some of my recycled Banff Manos yarn: it became the warp for the "Piping Hot Pillows" in Liz Gipson's Weaving Made Easy: 17 Projects Using a Simple Loom.  It's meant to be a simple project where you experiment with varigated yarns in different combinations as warp and weft.  Because I wanted to maximize my yarn, I decided to make both pillows using the Manos (in the colorway Thistle) as my warp.  Choosing a weft yarn was more challenging as I had lots of skeins that were the right weight and would have made an interesting counterpoint to the Manos.  In the end, I decided that I wanted to find a striping yarn (i.e. Kureyon or Silk Garden) that complemented the Manos so that I could get more color into the project without having to work very hard. 

The weft yarn that I ended up choosing was a single skein of Big Kureyon that has been languishing in my stash.  Originally I think I purchased it to become a felted cat bed, but I could never get myself excited about knitting up Kureyon for my cats, so it sat there in it's center pull ball, looking sad whenever I saw it. As it turns out, it was just waiting for this prioject.  I had just the perfect amount of yarn to make the two 17 inch pillows.  And I think the striping worked out amazingly well.  The pillows aren't completely matchy-matchy in stripe sequence, but the striping isn't visually discordant, either. 

On each end of each pillow there is an inch of hem that I wove using a bit of Lavold Silky Wool.  This piece won't end up visible, which is almost a shame because it had such an interesting texture agains the Manos.  Just goes to show that even things that you don't think will really work sometimes turn out to be really good combinations and that you shouldn't automatically dismiss anything when you are playing with color.

Each end of the pillow weft  is secured using a hem stitch, which took me a few minutes to get the hang of, but once I did was kind of fun and made a lovely edge.  I left that tiny gap to give myself a place to cut, but the way it turned out is so nice looking it makes me want to use it in an actual garment somday. 

I liked this view of a single pillow because it showed off not only the colors of the Kureyon (and how they played agains the dark Manos warp but also the variagation of the manos in the weft as well.  I think it has an interesting water colory effect... or like someone washed or wore away ares of color in the fabric.

The pattern suggests fulling before sewing and finishing and sealing in the pillow.  I am not sure I will full all that much, but I definitely will finish the fabric by giving it a good wash -- it's not really as soft as I might like for pillows.  But before I get to that I need to make the "piping" that's the hot part of these pillows -- from what I can see in the pattern, it looks a bit like the weaving equivalent of i-cord. I figure if I'm going to do any fulling, I should probably do both the pillow fabric and the piping together. 

For anyone who might be considering this project, after you get your loom warped up the weaving is over pretty quickly -- it doesn't take very long to weave 16" of pillow fabric when there are only 6 picks per inch.   It's an interesting way to experiment with variagated yarn and simple color combinations in plainweave -- and could be a nice way to use up a couple of solo aran weight skeins that you don't really know what to do with!