Blue Iris

The Purple Iris scarf that I posted is made from cotton and is a light year-round scarf. This one, Blue Iris, has a very similar color pattern, but is made from wool. After I finished weaving the scarf, I lightly felted it. The blue weft yarn is pure wool and felted moderately well. The multi-colored warp yarn is a wool blend and didn't felt much. I like the look. Felting this scarf made it much softer and more comfortable. It allowed the blue yarn to fill up any open weaving spaces and accentuates the colors in the warp yarn.

Making this scarf I experienced a whole new set of challenges. I knew I planned to felt this one, so I intended to make it wider and longer than average to allow for shrinkage. I ran out of the warp yarn before I had achieved the width that I wanted. I did make the scarf longer than I wanted. Because the weft shrunk more than the warp, I ended up with a very long skinny scarf - which is perfect because my intention was for this one to be wrapped twice around the neck - yeah, that's what I intended!

Early on I realized that something was wrong - my scarf wasn't advancing on the loom properly and looked cock-eyed. I didn't have the experience to know what was wrong though. Turns out that one of the strings that holds the advancing bar in place fell off, so when I tried to advance the piece, it wound more tightly on one side than the other. As a result, my weave is slightly off throughout the scarf. No problem - I planned to felt, and felting can hide a lot of mistakes.

This was a fun scarf to make, and despite the problems and imperfections, I think it made a pretty fabric. I twisted the fringe because I wasn't sure what it would do when felted and I love the look of twisted fringe.

The photos show the work in progress. I'm not sure if you can see the subtle differences in the scarf texture before and after felting.