The scarves on the cover of TIW are woven from Tencel.
I was an early adopter of Tencel. It appealed to me on a number of levels. As I put it into production, however, I found that it would sometimes behave beautifully – other times? Not so much.
Since I am a rather analytic type of person, I began trying to figure out what was happening and why.
The two big issues were that – at times – the yarn would seem to become almost brittle and a thread 2 or 3 or more in from the selvedge would suddenly, and without much warning, snap. It would also shed a huge amount of fluff.
As I worked with it I began to track the trend of it behaving in the summer (our humid months) and behaving badly in the winter (our arid months).
As more people began weaving with it there would be questions on the weaving groups about the sudden failure of the yarn not at the selvedge but several ends inside the cloth.
Typically all the usual culprits were blamed – excessive draw in, poor shuttle handling, poor bobbin winding, poor beaming, etc. People who had never had the issue blamed the one who was having difficulty for the problem concluding that they had done something ‘wrong’. Because they had never had a problem like that.
I would, instead, ask if the person having the problem lived in a humid or an arid climate. Inevitably the answer would be “arid”. Ah-ha, I thought, Tencel needs higher humidity to behave. I began advising those having the problem to run a humidifier.
My point is this. Your experience is your experience. There are factors that contribute to your experience that may be significantly different from someone else’s.
When people tell me something must always or must never be done a certain way, I ask them what their experience was that led them to that conclusion. Their experience may be different from mine. They may live in a humid environment, have a different loom than mine, be using yarn different from what I am using. I want to know the specifics so that I can judge whether or not their experience shines a light on mine.
We can learn from other people’s experiences, not just our own.