Another V

For reasons to be revealed later in this post, I needed another smallish V shawl. (Given the size it perhaps should be called scarf?)

This one should be wool, and threaded to a point.
As usual, I wanted to use more colours than one, and I wanted to warp with four ends.

Being lazy, I looked at the yarns in the loom room (the rest are downstairs...) and found two nuances of turquoise. To add someting more, I also picked some green (the same nuance, this time).

So I warped with four ends – two of each nuance, added two stripes of green.
This means each warp loop holds 8 ends (4 “coming” and 4 “going”), which means the pre-sleying (using the reed I was going to weave with) was done with one loop in every other dent:
(remember that all pictures can be clicked for a bigger version)

The two nuances do not show in the pictures taken with flash. The next photo is not in focus, but the colours are more true.

I threaded the colours so that each layer had it’s own nuance. For the outer stripes, I reversed the colours. (As you can see from the picture above, this means that the ends withing each group of four can be "twisted" – but as four ends represent 1/4 of a cm, it is impossible even to see that "twist".) I then wove with the "opposite" nuance, making the body of the scarf "solid coloured", that colour consisting of both nuances.

The trick to weave double layers is that all the sheds have to be clear – here are two of them:

When you come to the joining/shaping, you have to cut the whole loop. In this instance, the cut loop gave me 8 loose ends. To cope with that, I first take all ends over the shafts and hold them with my left hand (I do the join from the right).
After opening the shed, I can tension the loose ends to make the shed clear.

The trick to get a good join is to make sure there is no draw-in.

As the web gets narrower, it is all too easy to beat too hard. Also, the tension easily gets tighter. So: make sure the tension does not get too tight (let it off some), and be very careful with the beat. The narrower it gets, the hardet it is to get the weft tension correct. But: it is always better to have loops at the join than to have draw-in.
The last few ends are almost impossible to weave with any kind of "correct" anything, but that can be fixed after it is cut off.

After having adjusted most of the irregularities, it looked like this:

Some plain-weave joins within reach of the camera:

A double-weave join can be seen here, the third picture down.

After wet finishing and pressing, parading on the steps on Spinnhuset:

Now this one, together with the tencel one, is on the way to Handweavers in London (UK), to promote/illustrate the V-book (also on the way to London).

The book (in English) can also be bought from Laura Fry (click on "store", then "Weave a V"). I have them too, both in Swedish and in English.