I need to put more stuff over here! I've got a short WIP thread about this project over on my Twitter, but the long and the short of it is that I do big fiber arts projects better if I have a goal in mind, and the goal of this one is to get good enough at handspinning and weaving drafts that I can reproduce some of the fabric used to make the Lothlorien cloaks from Lord of the Rings. This is some Gotland wool yarn I finished plying tonight (not very well as it's still pretty unbalanced, but I wanted to free up bobbins more than I cared about a perfectly balanced yarn). I'm not expecting to do a 1:1 reproduction because I'm just not that good, but here's the rough plan:
- The Lothlorien pattern is a shadow weave variant made of alternating gray and white yarna. It's a REALLY cool color-and-weave optical illusion, where both warp and weft threads alternate between dark and light, and subtle skips in the pattern create either vertical or horizontal bars. I still haven't made a weaving draft that I like, but messing around with weaving software has been very useful in helping me learn what leads to what with shadow weave. My big unknown rn is how many shafts are needed to reproduce the pattern.
- For the gray yarn, Stansborough Wool used their own proprietary sheep breed developed in New Zealand. You can't buy unspun roving from them anymore, so I picked Gotland wool instead which is apparently the origin breed for Stansborough's variant.
- For the white yarn, I'm using a 33% merino 66% alpaca blend that I have no other reason for choosing other than that's what the fiber content on a Stansborough scarf I bought said, so I went with it. So far it's been a little bastard to spin and I much prefer the Gotland. I still haven't mastered spinning high twist singles for long periods of time without my hands cramping up, and the longer Gotland fibers don't need as much twist to stay together.
- I know weaving yarn is typically used as singles, but since the fabric made by Stansborough seems to use a 2-ply and I enjoy my yarn not acting like it's haunted, I decided to also go with a 2-ply for this project. I'm spinning both yarns as skinny as I can with a worsted draft, but I'm not physically capable of drafting out yarn as fine as what was used in the Stansborough fabric. I think their stuff is around 30 wpi and I'm clocking in around 20-25 wpi for my finished yarn.
- One sticking point to this project that I don't have quite figured out is the loom I'll use. The cloaks are half circles which requires a fairly wide fabric, and my Ashford table loom maxes out at 32". Up until recently that left me considering a couple options: 1) do some weird doubleweave bullshit to double the effective width of my loom at the cost of cutting the number of shafts I get to use in half, 2) rent time with a bigger loom at a local weaving studio and pray to god I spin enough yarn before I start so I don't run out halfway through, or 3) ctfo and be content with reproducing the fabric at a skinnier width even if I don't make a cloak out of it.
I'll be throwing up random bits of progress here as I make it, but I'm fully expecting this project is at least 1-2 years away from having a lot to show for itself.
