The Yarnarian Is Warped.

Info about the Wicked Women Sock and Scarf Club are just below this post. Go there and check it out. You know you want to!

You know how to tell the difference between warp and weft? Weft goes from weft to wight. Why should the Yarnarian care? Because on Saturday she and the Hubbo went on a lovely field trip and found, much to their surprise, an incredible easel and a warping board. No, not a wefting board, a warping board, as in a way to measure yarn with which to warp a loom. And again, why should a non-weaver care? Because she can now wind up enormous skeins of yarn without walking around pieces of furniture. Large skeins are no longer a cardio-vascular activity.

Once, in her dyeing youth, she tried making a very long skein. Yarn around various chairs, much walking, much bending. Oh, her aching back. But with this handy dandy warping device (device because I'm married to the King of Devices) placed securely onto that adjustable easel, and arranged for her shrimpy height, she can now make skeins that are as long as 14.5 yards. Yup, that's right!

Can you see the possibilities: striping yarn, long runs of color, lots and lots of colors with some length to them? Oh, be still, my beating heart. My cup runneth over with ideas!

Before you start jumping up and down screaming: "She can make striping yarns!", let me warn you that this is very labor intensive and takes much planning, math in fact: measuring my knitting, figuring out how many stitches I can get in a yard, or 2 yards on what size needles. And that's just the start of it. The winding up part of the process is very fast and easy, right off the cone. But the reskeining of it is another story. So, hold your girdles here, we are not doing stripes yet. They may or may not come. I may just dye very long areas of yarn in one color and then some short color bursts, and so on.

I may actually have to get precise here and write down formulae. Ack, me the playful dyer measuring lengths of yarn. Scary. But you know that something is in the works here.

Here's a pic of the warping board with one of the yarns on it, and ready to be wound up into a ball. The 2 skeins I made are each 6.3 yards. That doesn't sound very long, but the longest commercial skein you can find is 2 yards long.




This is not the configuration of how the yarn is originally wound up; I didn't take a pic of that. This is just how the first skein looks before I wound it into a ball.

I used gunmetal gray and parts of the skein left undyed. Knit up about 2 inches of it and decided that this would make great Hubbo socks. Mr Large Man has a big foot, so I will need another skein, and I'll just do that solid gunmetal gray, and use it as part of the striping factor.

Here is the second skein in various pics so you can get the idea. I wound that up and am playing with a new mitered scarf idea.






I did some dyeing but will post the pics next week. You can look forward to 1 skein of Shelly, a few Bambi skeins, and 2 gorgeous skeins of Judith lace yarn.

Henya - that was clearly my laugh of the month! You are a very wicked woman!

Linda - that's hilarious, and accurate, too!

Jo - I found them at different garage sales. the Hubbo is the junk/Schmutz Meister of northern NJ, and I often tag along and find goodies. The warping board stunned me. And at that price too.

It's raining again. I'm growing webs between my toes!

Holly - I don't weave. yet. It is tempting though.