I should have seen this coming. After all the moaning and grumbling about sampling, it should have been perfectly obvious that I’d be charmed by this little whimsy. I present my new BFF (Best Fabric Forever) – overshot.
Look at those adorable little diamonds. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Actually, let’s look a little bit closer.
Aren’t those little tweedy bits amazing? And they give just a hint of depth and interest to the color. Yeah, that’s my “Dead Weaver Stash” coming through again. No idea what it is other than some kind of wool single with tweedy bits. Best of all, I’d not planned on using this yarn for anything other than a sample on this warp. But once I wove off that first motif, I was hooked. Don’t worry though, I had done a whole bunch of sampling with the 8/2 Mill End Wool that I’d originally planned on for this sample. It’s a totally different animal.
In real life, the pattern is much less distinct. The wool bloomed much more than I expected and I don’t think there’s nearly enough contrast between the warp and pattern weft for the overall effect to come through. There’s a sample for both of you – I was at least smart enough to ensure I had plenty. And I’ll include a snippet of the yarns as well.
See? Super fuzzy. Super, DUPER fuzzy. Again, I should have (and kinda did) expected more bloom from this yarn than the tweed single – the single is quite round and “hard”. I’d almost think it’d been fulled as part of processing. I don’t think it’s sized, but I can have another look at the unwashed samples. The other yarn I sampled was a 5/2 Mercerized cotton. The finished fabric has an amazing sheen (mercerized) and the hand is quite nice but, again, the color is all wrong. I’m not at all fussed about it though – again, it was meant to be a sample. Getting a picture was difficult because of the reflection off of the cotton, but here goes.
Now, here’s the really, REALLY cool part. This fabric is stretchy. I mean, REALLY stretchy. It’s positively elastic! And that was completely out of the blue. Who knew? Is that predictable? It’s gotta be the wool doing it’s thing, but still. Crazy. This is like handwoven spandex. And now I want to do more. Maybe a wool/silk combination. And something with a less (ahem) exciting motif that would lend itself to a jacket. That might just mean super fine threads, and I can get behind that, but there’s absolutely more work to be done here. Not sure if this is vest-worthy, but there’s absolutely more overshot in my future. You two should try this.