This absurd yarn is 45% cashmere, 55% silk. I have never worked with anything even remotely like it - no cashmere, no silk, and definitely nothing so thin as 92 wraps per inch. Ninety fucking two.
New, it originally cost £200/kg. A very, very kind weaver in Scotland was de-stashing and sent me 5 kilos for £50 total (plus shipping).
I have many dreams for it but right now I mostly have screams. I have no real idea how it will behave in weaving, so I've wound a small warp for some sampling and a scarf. This is 3.5km of yarn (a bit over 2 miles) and it weighs 119 grams (a bit over 4 ounces?). For those of you playing along at home, each 1kg cone is thus 30 kilometres of yarn (nearly 20 miles). It does not feel like any other yarn I have ever touched.
Because it's so thin (difficult to handle or even see) and so valuable, I am using it with a "dummy warp" - I have left the remains of the baby blanket warp on the loom and then I tie the new warp to it, thread by thread by single fucking thread. This means I don't have to set up the loom all over again and almost none of the fancy yarn will become "loom waste", the unweaveable section of warp at the end of a project. But it also means tying every knot, perfectly in order for each end of both the old and new warps, without the cat getting too interested.
24 knots down, a mere 1000 to go...
A mild amount of back pain and an estimated 5.5 to 6 hours of knot tying later...
By the end I was up to 204 knots per hour, or 235 miles per hour². (This is a nautical units joke.) (It's not funny though.) Every tutorial warns you that it will look like a bird's nest at this stage but it's very hard to have faith.
But it straightened out! The knots flowed through the reed beautifully, and through the heddles only slightly less beautifully!
The new problem is the knots which spontaneously appear between the reed and heddles while winding on. Everywhere. All the time. I can wind on like two inches before needing to detangle 50% of the warp again, which really kills any sense of progress. Slow and unsteady may at least finish the race, perhaps by sometime next week...
WELL. Thank you for your good thoughts, everyone. That went badly.
After an estimated 20hrs of work - tying onto the dummy warp, trying to warp through all the tangles, then trying to unwarp and turn the threads on the loom back into a warp chain again, then trying to warp with that new chain, then cutting off the dummy warp section (sorry to my 1024 knots) and trying to wind on just the remainder, this is what I had to show for it:
Dummy warp braided/spun into a set of climbing ropes for my partner's pet mice, final warp attempt one enormous snarl (but at that stage I hadn't really expected it to work, this was a quick last effort before the bin). First warp I've had to give up on since my very very first project, where I had no idea how to put it on the loom and the cat got caught up in it.
But it's okay! I learnt a lot and I'm glad I tried it. It was slow but not usually frustrating, even when it didn't work. Someday I will try the new-to-me methods again, but in the meantime I will stick to familiar methods, which take a little more yarn in theory but will make up for it by not having to discard entire projects.
Today I measured out WARP 2: EVEN WARPIER and it wound onto the loom perfectly. I have threaded 140 of 800 warp ends so far. We'll get there.
Finished threading, sleyed the reed at 40 warp ends per inch. Tied on, started weaving, oh no it's massively off being balanced - in plain weave, 48 weft picks per inch compared to those 40 ends. I had thought the slight fuzzy halo on the yarn would fill out the gaps, but it was too fine.
Gentle sigh. Cut it off. Sleyed again at 50 warp ends per inch, still possibly a little low for the twill I had planned (twill requires higher epi than plain weave) but very easy maths. Much closer to square. Left some room for a fringe and then started a scarf for real.
I just--
It was worth it.
The weaving itself, once I got going, took barely a day - probably 4ish hours total. Tying and twisting the fringes was another few hours.
Next my partner asked around and found people happy to give me tiny quantities of delicate detergent for me to hand wash it, and then I excavated the iron from the attic for the first time in years, and now at last it is done. And I am so, so, so happy with it. There are mistakes but they don't matter, it's perfect.
