A new year and some new projects

I can't believe its been a whole year (and a bit!) since I last blogged.  Well, I have an excuse, and he's currently fast asleep on the floor ;-)

So I haven't had much time for craft activity - a bit of knitting, like this cute jumper I made for him

The pattern is a simple raglan I took from Erica Knight's Baby Bloom book, her version is plain with embroidered flowers, but I couldn't resist the colours in this self-patterning merino wool.  I've also taken up my patchwork again.  You can see a small cot quilt that H is lying on at the top, which is my first machined quilt - boy was that stressful doing the actual quilting!  I'm still working on my double, handpieced quilt (and  will be for a few years still, I suspect), but guess that I will need to hand it over to someone else to do the quilting as a small one was enough of a challenge for my old machine, and it did eat its way through a few needles too!

My exciting project is on the loom right now!  Here is the warp - my first end-on-end, bi-colour warp...

 Its a nice fine 10/2 cotton from Lunatic fringe, in red and yellow - it looks quite orange from a distance.

The plan is to weave two scarves from this, each to be elasticated double cloth.  I'm feeling a bit ambitious - I was always quite scared of the idea of a double cloth as it seemed so complicated - the idea is you have two separate blocks, so that you weave two intermeshed cloths simultaneously, so bits of one warp come through the other to make windows.  So it looks different on the top to the bottom.  Here is the first pattern repeat for the first scarf - its woven in lambswool, cotton and viscose covered elastic, so once it is finished and steamed it should go nicely crinkly.

 And underneath:

 Here you can see the two warps - one red and one yellow.

I'm really excited as to how the colours have worked together, you never quite know until you bring them all together on the loom.  The pattern is one from Margo Selby's new book Contemporary Weaving Patterns and I'm looking forward to trying out some more, or making up my own (gasp!) for the second scarf.

Katie x