Back in November I shared a photo of some roving that I purchased at this year’s Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival and mentioned that I was thinking about weaving with it as raw roving (as opposed to a spun yarn). I had a long weekend around Thanksgiving and finally sat down to warp my loom with a ball of White Palette at home. I’ve been weaving in bits here and there since then and finally finished on Sunday!

I decided to work with the brighter hank first.

I split the roving in half lengthwise again and again until I wound up
with strips of roving about as thick as a size 6 knitting needle and
wound each of these lengths into little butterflies around my fingers
and set them aside in a pile. I used these little roving
bundles like a traditional weaving shuttle and threaded them through the
warp, tugging on the roving to make it the same weight as the fingering
weight warp, unwinding some roving from the bundle as I needed it. 

It went really well and didn’t take me any longer to weave with roving than it takes me to weave with yarn. Palette held up extremely well as a warping thread and I’ll definitely be using it again. The edges are a little lumpy because the roving puffs and halos when it’s not being compressed by the warp. I have a feeling that the roving will bloom a bit when I block everything.

I don’t tend to measure things. I only recently started swatching a gauge for knitting projects and, I have to admit that I really, REALLY should have started earlier. With weaving, it’s calculating yardage and warp and all those pesky steps that get in the way of sitting down to weave. I pish-poshed any sort of planning for this piece and wound up with a five foot long piece of weaving that is under four inches wide (a bit narrow for my original scarf idea). Luckily there is plenty of time to ponder things while you’re weaving so I’ve dreamed up the idea to use pieces of this as a decorative strip across some fabric pillows. We’ll see if I ever go down that path or if this will come to rest with all of the other weaving and spinning projects I have lurking in the bottom drawer of my linen closet.