Sequined Shawl Sampling

As I was sampling for an upcoming project, I took a detour with a long color change yarn… yummy.
My intent was to sample Universal Yarn’s Deluxe DK Superwash as a warp in an 8 dent reed (I happened to have Classic Pink). I had hoped to use another colorway in the same yarn for the weft, but the one I had chosen didn’t look quite right. I went into my stash and found Classic Shades Sequin Lite in the colorway “Lucky Rose” (also from Universal Yarn), and I thought, why not?

It is a very captivating look, and I learned something interesting about working with the color changes. I found this out the hard way. When I got to the end of my first bobbin, the color was different from the start of my next bobbin. I took the last part of the yarn on the bobbin that was running out and some of the new bobbin and alternated them so they would blend, but it was obvious that strategy was not going to create a flow in color. I wondered how to introduce the grace of the color changes of the yarn into my weaving.

Then I realized that when winding a bobbin for the weft yarn, I was reversing the direction of the color run. If I transferred the yarn from that bobbin to another bobbin, I could right the direction of the color change. If I did that for all of my bobbins, the yarn would flow in my weaving the exact way it did in the skein. (I wound bobbins for my boat shuttle, but the same process would apply to stick shuttles).

I rewound every bobbin after that and it created the color change below. Seamless… you can’t even tell where I switched bobbins.

This blew my mind a bit – something as simple as rewinding bobbins made such a profound difference! This didn’t give me the information that I needed for my next project, but I learned a valuable lesson for long color changes.