Big Checkered Plaid Scarf Project

Posted by Amy and Emily on Dec 16th 2021

We're getting down to the wire for handmade Christmas gifts to get finished. We wanted to give you an easy (and quick) project idea that you could easily weave up over a weekend. We used one color of West Yorkshire Spinners The Croft Shetland Tweed and one in The Croft Shetland Solids to create a big Buffalo plaid pattern in a cohesive color palette. We also added a neat little technique of weaving a hole with finished edges into the end of your scarf so you can tuck one end of the scarf into the other instead of tying or wrapping it.

Materials Needed:

2 Skeins of West Yorkshire Spinners Shetland Yarn. We used one skein of Tweed (Stonybreck) and one skein from the Solids line (Norwick).
Loom that is wider than your desired scarf width (We used the Schacht Cricket 10" Loom)
8 Dent Rigid Heddle
Shuttles
Scissors
Fringe Twister (optional, only needed if you want twisted fringe)

Pattern: Plain Weave

We wrote this pattern up for a Rigid Heddle Loom but you can also use a Floor Loom or a Table Loom! Check out our blog post, How to Create Plain Weave on a Multi Harness Loom if you need help setting up your treadles!

Color Management: In our scarf Color A is the Tweed Stonybreck and Color B is the Solid Norwick.

Warp

We made a 80" long warp. This scarf has a slit in it to put the other end through so you don't need as much fabric to wrap around. Our warp is 8" wide plus one pick. You could make your scarf wider or skinnier than this, it doesn't matter. Remember if you make your scarf wider you will need more yarn!

To create our Big Checkered Plaid we have 1 inch of Color A (8 ends), 3 inches of Color B (24 ends), 3 inches of Color A (24 ends), and 1 inch of Color B plus one pick (9 ends). The extra pick helps keep your edges more even!

Weft

Before you get started wind up a shuttle for each of your colors. We started with Color B and wove for 1 inch plus one pick (9 picks). Then weave 3 inches of Color A (24 picks) and 3 inches of Color B (24 picks). Then we placed our slit. Amy has some helpful tips and tricks in the video below to show you a great way to weave in your ends as you go as well as how to create a hole in your weaving with finished edges for the slit.

The rest of the warp is just continuing to alternate between 3 inches (24 picks) of Color A and B. When you are happy with the length of your scarf finish off with 1 inch (8 picks) of Color A.

Our scarves EPI (ends per inch) is 8 and our PPI is 7-8 (picks per inch). We stopped when we had used as much of our weft yarn as possible which ended up being about 52" of woven fabric.

Finishing

We wanted twisted fringe on our scarf so we did 2 strand bundles of twisted fringe on both ends of our scarf. Our fringe is 2 inches long.

The Croft Shetland Yarn is our 10th Fiber Gift of Christmas which means it's on sale for 15% off now through December 23rd! This yarn is great because the speckles of the tweed match perfectly to the solid colors so you can easily make a really lovely scarf by picking two corresponding colors. We took photos of each of the Tweed yarns with their solids that match so you can choose your own scarf palette!

All of the solid color names are listed from Left to Right in the photos below.