I was at Romney Wools, in the early days of loom ownership, looking for colourful self striping yarns to weave up. Weaving with self striping wool is like making a stockinette project for me in knitting – mindless and relaxing, where the beauty of the yarn can do all the work. The difference here is that, personally, I find weaving variegated yarns to be even more beautiful and gratifying than knitting them.

I ended up falling in love with this yarn called ‘Katia’ by a company called Jaipur (based, interestingly, out of Spain). The colour is out of this world.

I bought 3 balls of this stuff, and hoarded it for weeks, waiting for the right moment to warp it up. I ended up warping a 6 foot long scarf, using the same yarn for both warp and weft. From the moment I started to weave, I knew something wasn’t right.

This yarn is 100% mercantile cotton lace weight. It has almost no stretch, and weaves into something that feels, more or less, as though I wove with dental floss. If I had known, I would have been making dish towels instead of a scarf, because that’s what this yarn is for.

The final piece, even when washed, has a rigid, waxy feel to it. Even for my shots, freshly dried, it has wrinkles that I would have had to iron out. Unless I’m making towels, this is the last time I will work with this stuff.

Disappointing, but a good learning experience. I have been busy on the loom but lazy on the blog for a few days, but the next 3 posts after this will both be about painful learning experiences! When this latest one is done I’ll definitely have to warp up something easy and predictable to recover ;)