This is just a quick post to let everyone know that I have revamped my Etsy shop.  I’m now sorting all my yarns by weight.  My goal is to make it easy for knitters, crocheters, and weavers to easily find the kind of yarn they need for a project they are planning.

I also just took several favorite yarns off Etsy.  I’m going to be weaving a nursing poncho for myself as I have a baby due in a few months.  I’m still in the planning stages, which always takes me awhile, but here’s what I’m thinking.  I want it to be very lightweight so it can be worn year around.  I’ll definitely be using some solid purple laceweight lamb’s wool yarn.  I’m also going to use this laceweight bamboo and superwash wool blend that I dyed:

Monet’s Waterlilies

It’s called Monet’s Waterlilies, and the yarn is an incredibly light laceweight at about 32 wraps per inch.  The purple laceweight is close at 28 wraps.  I don’t have a picture of it handy, but when we were in Maine a couple years ago, I bought a whole bunch of mill ends of this same yarn.  It’s very soft, and I’ve used it as the warp for several scarves, and it has behaves very nicely.

Here’s my dilemma:  I’m a little concerned that I won’t have quite enough of Monet’s Waterlilies to complete the project.  I calculate that I need 954 yards of warp, and since I’ll be doing plain weave on my rigid heddle, I should need very close to that amount in weft.  However, I have 962 yards of Monet’s Waterlilies, which is a little close for comfort, especially with this fine laceweight yarn.  Therefore I have decided to add a third yarn to both the warp and weft that’s I’ll be using somewhere between every 12th and 24th warp and every 12th and 24th weft, thus making squares of a thicker yarn.  I’m trying to decide between these 2 yarns for those squares:

Sapphires

 

Primavera

I like the Primavera better.  It’s a soft mohair boucle that is DK weight, and Monet’s Waterlilies has all those colors in it.  However, I’m afraid the boucle might take over the whole piece, and since the colors are a little deeper it might all be a little too much.  The Sapphires yarn, which is a very soft alpaca, would be a safer choice for sure and less likely to be too prominent within the entire woven piece.  However, well, it’s not like me to go with the safer choice.  Still, I want this to be a piece I can wear for years, and I’ve had a few occasions when I’ve added one too many elements to something I’m weaving and regretted it.

Oh–in case you’re wondering the reason I want to use this yarn in both the warp and the weft is that this particular poncho is made with two 38″ long pieces that are put together side to side, so the vertical axis on one will be the horizontal axis on the other when I’m all done.

What do you think?  Which one should I go with?