Wool Rainbow

A gift from my daughter's destashing. 100% wool, Kauni Effektgarn ---

--- and a garden stake meant for holding flags or banners  ---

---will hopefully play nicely together and become a Rainbow banner for my garden. I use the term "garden" rather loosely here. I realize that a few tulips gathered around an apple tree does not a garden make. I'm no garderner. Work with me here, m'kay? At least the banner will bring some colour to the mud and grass back there.

I wanted the warp to retain the same colour progression as the yarn did in the balls, but wasn't sure how to go about that. The traditional method of winding a warp has you going down, reversing, and coming back up again measuring each warp strand. That wouldn't work for my purpose because it would reverse each warp strand and interrupt the perfect colour progression.

Enter the wonders of the Internet and online forum friends. I asked for a brainstorming session on this problem and less than 24 hours later someone came up with the solution! They suggested that I measure the warp in a complete circle, and they even pointed me in the direction of a tutorial. The tutorial was written for hand painted skeins being prepared for faux ikat, but it works equally well for any interesting yarn that you want to preserve the colour sequence of. I immediately pinned the tutorial to my Pinterest board so I wouldn't lose it!

I really only need a finished woven length of 29 inches, but that made the colour progression far too slow. I would have only gone through three or four colours before I arrived at the full 14 inch width I was aiming for. So I lengthened my measuring path to a full 6 yards, LOL. My plan is to weave the whole thing off and then decide what section I want to keep for the banner. The rest will likely become part of some sewing project or another at some time. This is feltable wool, so that might be an option too.

For the non-weaving blog readers I just want to point out that the section you see woven in the last picture is NOT part of the final weaving. This is what is called a "header", and it is just scrap fabric that I will pull out later. A header is used to quickly align the individual warp threads so that they are all parallel and ready for weaving.