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Rigid Heddle Watercolor Scarf Project
We love projects where you can let the yarn do all of the hard work for you. Working with Painted Desert Yarn is so fun because you can just sit back and relax with some plain weave and watch beautiful gradient color transitions come together before your eyes. Use your rigid heddle loom to its fullest potential.
Materials Needed:
- 2 Balls of Painted Desert Yarn in the same color (The scarves in our photos use Carnival and Aqua Burst)
- Loom that is wider than your desired scarf width (We used an Ashford Knitters Loom 20 inch)
- 10 Dent Rigid Heddle
- Shuttles
- Scissors
- Masking Tape
- Pen (to write on the tape)
- 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!
Warp
We made our warp 80" long and 13" plus one pick wide in the reed. This gives us 131 warp threads. 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! Once you start warping just keep going, don't stop and. cut your ball of yarn as this will interrupt the gradient sequence of the yarn.
Note: We would normally recommend a 12 Dent Rigid Heddle for this yarn to create a balanced weave, but we wanted a gauzy lightweight texture for our scarf so we are recommending you use a 10 Dent Rigid Heddle.
Weft
When you work with gradient yarns you have to do some thinking to make sure you wind your bobbins/shuttles in a way that won't put your gradient sequence out of order. Trust us, if you just wind off the ball without thinking about it you're going to have some jarring lines in your scarf and not achieve the watercolor effect. Watch the YouTube Video below for Amy's technique on keeping your color sequencing perfect every time!
This technique will work for any gradient yarn, self striping yarn, or color pooling yarn where you want to make sure you're keeping the correct ends of your yarn together!
Our scarf's EPI (ends per inch) is 10, because we're using the 10 Dent Rigid Heddle. Our PPI (picks per inch) was 11. We stopped once we ran out of our weft yarn. This gave us 68 inches of woven fabric. We finished our scarf with hemstitch and some twisted fringe. We used 6" of warp for our twisted fringe. We twisted 2 sets of 2 ends together 18-20 times and then tied them off to make each fringe bundle. This made finished fringe around 5.25 inches long.
These scarves weave up quickly so they make excellent gifts! They also look very impressive with the lovely color changes but are so easy to make. We'd love to see your finished projects on social media! Tag us on Facebook or Instagram.
Painted Desert Yarn is also our 2nd Fiber Gift of Christmas, so you can pick it up now through October 28th for 15% off!
Wondering where to buy this yarn? Buy here
KFI Collection Painted Desert Yarn
$16.95
The delicate and durable superfine wool yarn comes in a variety of color changing options. Ideal for warp or weft. We have a rigid heddle...… read more
