Weave Your Own Meteor Shower in a Twinkling Huck Scarf

After wet-finishing, charcoal gray wool and cotton woven in a houndstooth-style huck reveal an undulating all-over texture in Rebecca Fox’s design. Occasional stripes of natural create stars radiating beams of light across the piece. Feel free to place your stars wherever you want—or even add more in both warp and weft to create a grand meteor shower!

Read on to learn more about this project, developed exclusively for the Winter 2025 issue of Handwoven, or head to the library to access the project PDF and WIF. Please enjoy this subscriber bonus project from the Winter 2025 collection.—Handwoven editors

About the Shooting Stars Scarf

Dimensional cloth has always fascinated me. I’ve long wanted to weave this draft for huck and plain-weave houndstooth [PAYWALL] after seeing it in Carol Strickler’s book (see Resources below). The example in the book uses three shades of yarn in both warp and weft, but using a single color for most of the weaving—in this case charcoal gray—with just one stripe of natural white in warp and weft creates star shapes, radiating beams of light across the fabric.

You can break the draft down into two blocks for both the threading and the treadling. Blocks A and B interact in alternating squares of plain weave and floats that create stars. The fabric has a nice texture on its own, but intermittently adding two shots of coordinating gray wool in the dark gray cotton weft increases the drama and makes the stars almost appear to twinkle in the fabric.

I have recently discovered that Knit Picks now carries some of their knitting yarns on cones. Their Palette wool in a dark charcoal gray matched the cotton nicely.

Place a few shooting stars wherever you like, or go all out to create a grand meteor shower.

For the stars’ weft, I used 24" lengths of Natural and let them dangle off the selvedges. I tied the six overhanging threads together with an overhand knot after removing the scarf from the loom.

I wet-finished the scarf in the washing machine with some towels and then machine dried everything together. When the scarf emerged, the texture revealed itself.

You could weave this scarf without using wool, but without it, you won't have the same undulations caused by differential shrinkage. Feel free to place your stars wherever you want—you could even add more stripes of stars in both warp and weft to create a grand meteor shower!

The undulating texture emerged after wet-finishing, thanks to a combination of wool and cotton.

Weave it Yourself: Project Overview

STRUCTURE
Huck.

EQUIPMENT
8-shaft loom, 11" weaving width; 8- or 10-dent reed; 2 shuttles; 3 bobbins.

YARNS
Warp: Beam 3/2 (100% organic cotton; 1,260 yd/lb; Gist Yarn), Licorice, 438 yd; Natural, 18 yd.
Weft: 3/2 cotton, Licorice, 270 yd; Natural, 14 yd. Palette (100% wool; 231 yd/50 g; Knit Picks), Asphalt Heather, 50 yd.

WARP LENGTH
152 ends 3 yd long (includes floating selvedges; allows 7" for take-up, 34" for loom waste; loom waste includes fringe).

SETTS
Warp: 14 epi (2-2-2-1/dent in an 8-dent reed or 1-2-1-2-1/dent in a 10-dent reed).
Weft: 14 ppi.

DIMENSIONS
Width in the reed: 11" (8-dent reed) or 10⁹⁄₁₀" (10-dent reed).
Woven length: (measured under tension on the loom) 67".
Finished size: (after wet-finishing) 8¼" × 56" plus 5" fringe, 7" side fringe.

Weave it Yourself: Project PDF + WIF Link

Visit the Handwoven library to get the PDF and WIF for the Shooting Stars Scarf.

Resources

Rebecca was inspired by the huck and plainweave houndstooth (#678, woven by Karen Evanson) in Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns (Loveland, CO: Interweave, 1991).