Contrasts

I’m sitting in Brainwash, an ingenious laundromat-cafe, sipping a latte and playing with Photoshop while reading my email and incidentally laundering a comforter that the Fuzz did something unpleasant to last night (you really don’t need the details!).  Only in San Francisco…but hey, it’s a pleasant way to pass the time if you need to do laundry.  Kudos to Brainwash for getting it right.

Anyway, I have been messing with Photoshop and liftplans, and produced the following interesting combination a few minutes ago:

The first section is a mix of 1/4 satin (background), 3/2 satin, and 4/1 satin; the bottom section is just a set of squiggles in 1/4 and 4/1 satin.

I find it intriguing how the contrast varies – in the first section the lines are soft and blurred, in the second section they’re bold and stand out clearly against the background.  I will probably weave with both options and see how it comes out – I think in a weft that stands out clearly against the warp.

I like the scale of this particular design (the threading, incidentally, is a large semicircle chopped down and turned into concentric bits-of-circle in Photoshop) – the semicircles are about 1.5″ in diameter, making the overall scale of the design relatively small.  I like the organic, curvy nature of the squiggles (which I drew freehand using the pencil tool in Photoshop, with a brush diameter of 5) – I was going to use more regular shapes like circles and ellipses, but now I think I like it the irregular nature.