chenille – I Dyed it My Way

For quite a while now, I have had a few cones of chenille yarn sitting on my shelf, just waiting for my inspiration to transform them into something warm and wonderful. Earlier this winter I was working in my somewhat chilly basement studio and wished for a warm and attractive garment that I could wear while working and not have to change when I suddenly decide to dash out for a bite of dinner. I thought of the chenille yarn and pondered how to use it.

In my mind’s eye, I am still designing wearables with loom-shaped woven rectangles of fabric. I decided to make a pullover tunic top, or sweater, with primarily rectangular pieces that come straight off the loom, and zero to minimal tailoring. I sketched and planned and decided to use the 3-panel design I wove previously based on a Mexican huipil, although for this one I wanted sleeves and a cozy collar to keep cold drafts from blowing down my neck.

My design was simple enough: I needed approximately 6 yards of narrow 8-inch panels for the body and collar plus a bit extra for who knows what, and 1.5 yards of a wider panel for sleeves and who knows what. It’s always better to have a little too much finished fabric than too little. I decided to make the wider panel 12 inches wide. My chenille yarn is 2,000 yards per pound and I set it at 15 ends per inch so the finished fabric would have integrity and not slide and droop.

I chose the blue yarn, wound my warps and wove the narrow strip first. Six yards is a lot, but I just wove plain weave and it did not take long to complete. I wet-finished and line-dried the fabric, concluding with a final tumble in the dryer with no heat, just to soften it up. When I measured the cloth strip, my 6-yard length was there, but it was only 7 inches wide. I added another half-inch worth of warp to the wider strip and wove that at 12.5 inches wide. After finishing, I had 1.5 yards of 11-inch wide cloth. I decided to forge ahead with my design, resolving to shed a few extra pounds so the garment is not too tight a fit.

Nearing the end of the narrow 8-inch strip, with almost 6 yards wound on the cloth beam.

I cut the narrow strip into pieces: two 50-inch side front and back panels, one 19-inch center front panel and a 24-inch center back panel. I overlapped the edges slightly and used a decorative stitch to sew them together, but the fancy stitch is invisible in the deep fuzz of the chenille. I cut a 28-inch piece for a Mobius strip (one twist) collar and stitched it in place. That was a little too long for the opening, but I have to get it over my head, so I left a couple of inches to softly drape at the sides of the center front panel.

Assembling the panels: sides front and back, center front and center back.

Now for the sleeves. I cut two 21.5-inch long pieces from the wider cloth strip and attached them to the side panel edges so they would form a square when stitched along the bottom, but this left the sleeves too short and in need of a gusset where they attached to the body. Out of the remaining 11-inch square of the wider cloth, I cut two small 5.5-inch squares for underarm gussets. The remaining piece of narrow cloth was about 40+ inches. I cut that into two pieces to extend the sleeve length, and made an angled seam in the larger sleeve piece so that the sleeve extension fit the sleeve edge.

Hooray! The finished garment fits over my head and around my body and is the soft and warm sweater top I imagined. After cutting and piecing, the project used up all of my woven strips except for a few very small pieces. I’m planning to use the rest of my chenille yarn in a couple of similar projects, perhaps for next winter.