I’ve now gotten the third suggestion that I just use a plain satin for the dress under the coat, and am seriously considering it, despite thinking that plain satin would be incredibly boring to weave. Sometimes one has to subordinate intellectual interest to the needs of the art piece, and this may be one of those cases. That said, I still plan to weave up a couple of samples just to see how they came out.
On the plane today I was wondering about a fabric Sharon had showed me that was squares of plainweave and squares of long weft floats. It was basically blocks of a fabric that was plainweave on one side and weft floats on the other side (at least I think that’s what I was seeing). I thought this looked really really cool, but wondered what would happen if you extended this concept and used it to create heart shaped designs?
So I fiddled with it for a couple of hours and came up with this:
I shifted the floats over slightly so no individual float is longer than a couple of threads; otherwise there would have been some VERY long floats!
I’m not sure yet whether I got this right, so I’m posting the .wif. Here it is! I’m hoping I did it right and it will work.
At any rate, I basically agree with the people who have said that a plain, shimmery satin weave would be the best choice. I’m just trying to convince myself that it would be worth my time to weave. I really want the dress to be handwoven, so I’m struggling between my artistic impulses for the outfit and my desire to keep exploring complex cloth in my weaving. If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them! I think the dress will be best being of a very simple looking fabric, but maybe some subtle, white-on-white designs?
Or you could do a fabric that is mostly satin with small stripes of hearts every few inches?
And face it, no matter the weave structure, it will be a lot of weaving. OTOH, you did the fabric for the coat, so I see no difficulty your doing the dress fabric. 😀 Just zen on it……….
Cheers,
Laura