This past weekend, I went to a shop called Nantucket Looms. The first floor has lots of home furnishings and at the back of the shop is a selection of woven items such as blankets, throws, towels, scarves, and shawls. Some were made of silk, or silk + wool, or cotton, or wool.

It was tempting to plunk down at least $325 for a luscious woven wrap with a herringbone pattern, but I resisted. My willpower is getting better! LOL!

The second floor is where all the woven items on the first floor are made. They had at least four floor looms and each one had someone weaving on it. The colors were beautiful and the quality of the yarn excellent. One woman was weaving a light pink mohair and the bed of the loom was at least 3 feet wide.

Watching her work, I got to thinking. My mom had given me an inkle loom while I was in high school. I had made a few bands on it using crochet cotton but nothing I was really thrilled by. Could I use that loom to make something else? I have lots of partial skeins of yarn in my stash that might work. Even some mohair which I was given by other folks.

The first step was to figure out if the inkle loom was in the basement and it was indeed covered with a drycleaning bag. I made new heddles for it. Then I found four different skeins of mohair that would work for a scarf.

Warping the loom took time and I created a stripe pattern using the blue and red boucle yarn. I used all of the dowels on the loom to make as long a scarf as possible. Each weft loop was 72 inches long.

This morning for 4 hours I wove the weft using a creamy colored mohair. At first, I thought I would not be able to advance the warp because of the fuzziness of the mohair going through the heddles but I figured out a way to pull with gentle pressure so I could move the warp 6 inches at a time.

I used a knitting needle to push the sheds up and down. When it was time to pick up the heddled threads, the knitting needle came in handy because I could use the tip to pick up each heddled yarn. Before I passed the weft across to the other side, I checked the yarn strands on the knitting needle to make sure I had picked up the correct number of strands for each color. Picking up the heddled threads took a lot of patience. The knitting needle also came in handy when lifting the threads to create each shed since I could use the needle to disentangle to mohair halo which had a tendency to mat.

When I had finished weaving, I untied the bow knots that I used when changing color on the warp. Then I took scissors and cut the other threads approximately in the middle of the unwoven section. Using an overhand knot, I knotted off the ends two strands of yarn at a time.

It is not a perfect scarf. I can see places now where I did not pass the weft entirely between all the strands so there are some places where the outermost yarn is loose. Overall, I would say this experiment was a success. The scarf is a bit scratchy — that is the nature of mohair — but I think it will be quite warm.