When I got my loom, one of the first things I did was beg a skein of Tanis’s discontinued colourway ‘Harvest’ off of Rayna’s stash. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but since I got the loom, wildly variegated colours that I would not have found appealing to knit with have been calling my name.

Weaving is a completely different way of blending beautiful colours into a larger composition, without the striping that comes with stockinette.

I wound it into a cake and there it stayed. I knew it was hard to get another one, so I was waiting for just the right idea to come to me.

Then I saw this article on weaving a palindrome skein. Here was my first attempt at doing this. The warp was offset slightly, so the colours shifted across the piece, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

To make this one work I had to be willing to throw away a certain amount of yarn. I measured my warp as carefully as I could, and then tried to make sure that it was always navy blue at the loom end, and bright yellow at the warping peg end.

Whenever the colour shifted away from that, I would cut the yarn, move to the next navy blue bit, tie on and start again. It was heartbreaking to watch the waste yarn pile up, but the slight tension changes, and the distance to the peg make the shifting inevitable, and it was the only way to make sure it worked.

The weft is black, lace weight, Malabrigo silkpaca. I didn’t do anything fancy with the weaving, just a straight weave with hem-stitched edges.

I’m thrilled with the results, so much so that I’ve gone onto the Tanis Fiber Arts destash/ISO thread to see if anyone else is willing to part with a skein, and a lovely lady has offered to sell me her skein of ‘Prism’. Stay tuned for another one of these!