I've Got The Woolies!

I'm scared of wool. Well, not so much scared as apprehensive about the finished product after fulling. I see nightmarish images of my carefully woven fabric shrinking away to nothingness. Also, as someone who suffers from Psoriasis, I've tended to work with bamboo and cotton and have steered clear of notoriously itchy wool . In my experience, bamboo and cotton fabrics can be soothing to sensitive skin. They are also easy to work with and easy care. That being said, I've always looked longingly at the beautiful skeins of wool throughout my local yarn shop and thought that I'd be brave enough to work with them one day. 

Sooooo, I bought 2 cones of Brown Sheep Nature Spun Fingering wool in White and a vibrant teal-ish blue. I wound 240 ends as flollows: (20w,40b,40w,40b,40w,40b,20w). I sleyed 2 ends per dent in a 10 dent reed for 20 epi. I hope the fabric is not too dense after fulling. Maybe I should've used a looser sett. We will see. I planned on two scarves; one tabby & one 2/2 twill, so I threaded 1,2,3,4 across.

I had 3 broken warps to tend with while winding onto the back beam. The wool threads don't slide through the heddles as easily as with cotton and a few of the warps became stuck to one another as I wound them through. To accommodate the twill I plan on doing, I began my threading on shaft 2 and ended with a shaft 3. This threading ensures that the selvedges thread is caught on each pick. This is one of my favorite new tricks. Goodbye floating selvedges!

Here is the 1st few inches of weaving. 

So far so good. Hopefully I'll have the 1st scarf off the loom tomorrow. 

Happy Weaving!