International Scarf Exchange

This year I again took on the challenge of participating in the International Scarf Exchange. The exchange is run by a different weaving guild each year, and this year the task was taken on by several guilds in the Shoalhaven area of New South Wales. Each participant sends in 150 grams of fibre. You receive someone else’s fibre and you make them a scarf (or shawl, socks etc.). I received three shades of naturally coloured corriedale fibre that I spun up into laceweight yarn.

As I had been recently experimenting with shadow weave, I decided to design a shadow weave scarf using 3 colours rather than 2. After much experimentation using WeaveIt Pro weaving software, I decided to divide the warp into 3 sections. One side would have alternating warps of cream and light grey, the middle would alternate cream and dark grey, and the other side would alternate light grey and dark grey. To add a bit of interest, I dyed a small portion of the two lighter colours a bright turquoise. Here’s the resulting draft:

The weft mirrored the warp, with 1/3 woven with cream/light grey, 1/3 with cream/dark grey and 1/3 with light grey/dark grey. The turquoise stripe was only at one end of the weft.

While the resulting scarf was quite nice, if I were to do this again I would want more contrast between the two lightest colours. Where the warp and weft colours were the same, the diamond pattern was quite clear, but where they differed the pattern was more subtle.

Here’s the result, which was mailed back to the exchange organisers last month:

In a few months I’ll receive a scarf created by someone else from the fibre I supplied late last year. Can’t wait to see what I get!