Once upon a time, some friends of mine and I swapped tiny balls of yarn. A couple years later, some more friends and I swapped some mini-skeins.

So here I am, with nearly 500g of odds and end balls of sock yarn. I also have quite a few partial balls of sock yarn, many of which were leftovers from gifts that I had made for family and friends.

So I decided to toss them all together and use them to make a shawl that I can pull around me when times are tough. It will be like getting wrapped in the hugs of all of my friends.

My husband thinks I’m nuts!

We will see if I really am.

Wound the warp. Realized that I had double-threaded two slots and the edges were rather lumpy from where the paper had bunched funny. Unrolled it, fixed the doubles, removed four threads from each end, then tried again. This is MUCH better!

57 different yarns used in the warp
65 different yarns used in the weft

I started with a bunch of balls of yarn. Some were 10g, some were 30g, and some were varying amounts left over from projects.

I sorted the balls into two groups. The ones that were heavier than fingering weight or loosely plied handspun went in one pile, and everything else went into the other. The first pile was used for the warp. Both piles were used for the weft.

First I made warp chains, using each color for 4 or 6 warp threads. I tried to stagger the warp so that variegated yarns were next to solids, semi solids, or self-striping and so that “light” colors were next to “dark”. Before I started a new color, I put it next to the one before it to make sure the combination didn’t clash.

For weft, I built one big ball of yarn, using a similar process for selecting yarns. I cut 3-6 yard lengths from the “scrap” balls and used a Russian join to connect them. (I just pulled out 4-6 arm-lengths, cut it, joined, and wound it into the big ball. It sounds tedious, but it was a great mindless activity while watching the new season of “Orange is the new black”!) The joins eliminated the need to deal with weaving in ends, though there were a crap-ton of ends where my Russion joins were shoddily done.

The final weave has a few errors and the edges aren’t perfect, but I’m good with that. My friends aren’t perfect, but they’re beautiful anyway!

I finished it with a knotted hem stitch (found on Interweave) and 4 strand twisted fringe.

Finishing: soaked in room temp, soapy water for 20 minutes, agitated for about 5 minutes on gentle cycle, and spun water out. Tossed in dryer on low heat setting and dried for about 20 minutes, until some of the more loosely spun handspun yarn showed signs of shrinking disproportionately to the rest of the yarns. It’s still a little airy but nowhere nearly as much as before.

Warped: 24” x 109” (I wanted something generously sized!)
Finished: 21.5” x 90.5” (still generously sized)

10 dent heddle