My Noro scarf is finished now, and I really couldn’t be happier about how it turned out!

I’m so glad I decided to use Noro for the warp as well as the weft. I’m not a hug fan of the look of self-striping yarn normally (though it does have it’s uses for toys and lacework), but here I adore the interplay between the changing colours in the warp and weft. I doesn’t look so much striped as just a lovely array of shifting colour.

I made this scarf on my Ashford Sampleit loom, using a 10 dpi heddle and the full 20 cm weaving width. The yarn is Noro Taiyo Lace, a lace-weight (2 ply) single ply yarn which is composed of 50% cotton, 17% wool, 17% polyamide and 16% silk. The project used around 450 m of yarn, leaving me with a little under half the skein that I could use in another project.

This project was certainly not without its challenges. Single-ply laceweight handspun-ish yarn does not make an ideal warp and I had breakages, many breakages (ten or so I’d say). But I found that they were easy to fix and I think you’ll agree that they don’t impact the finished product detrimentally, I actually like the occasional shots of random colour. I will certainly not let the experience turn me off weaving with warps like this. I think it’s just something you take in your stride, as part of the process, rather then seeing it as a problem or a setback.

I also needed to be careful about the way in which I loaded yarn on the shuttle, to ensure a nice progression of colours.

In progress, with cat.

Once the scarf was off the loom I needle wove in all the ends (there were a lot because of the breaks), and washed it, using my own hair conditioner in the place of fabric softener. I let it dry, then trimmed the ends and the fringe. After an iron the scarf really came to life. So much pretty!

I’m titling this post ‘Noro scarf #1’ because I’m sure it wont be my last.