Yesterday I drove up to Concord to meet with the couture teacher (Sharon Bell). She’s great! She had some useful advice and recommendations:
- The smaller eternity-knot motifs will do just fine, though I’ll need to open up the sett to make the fabric more fluid. Right now it’s a little stiff (not quite as stiff as a brocade, but going in that direction), which won’t work as well with the flowing coat design. I’ll also need to play with the spacing of the eternity knots. So it looks like I will be weaving with 60/2 silk after all!
- Make the coat first, and then the dress, because the coat is the central part of the ensemble, and the dress is form-fitting, so putting a coat over it won’t create problems.
- Measure the coat pattern and make adjustments based on the pattern measurements before doing the first muslin – she showed me how to do this, it’s simpler than I thought!
So now I have a dilemma on my hands. Weave the coat fabric samples? Weave the ribbon? Make the muslin for the coat? Start testing chocolates? So many wonderful things to try, so little time!
…I think I’m going to start by making the coat muslin, and modifying the eternity knot motifs. I think I can make the eternity knots work against a 6-shaft broken twill background, which would give me better contrast. It won’t alter the size of the knot but it will make it more visible. I’m also considering replacing one of the strands of metallic gold weft with a strand of brown silk weft, to make the motifs more visible. Which means dyeing some 120/2 weft colors for sampling. More stuff to do!
If I finish the coat muslin tomorrow, I’ll probably work on the eternity knot samples next. But it all depends on when my loom’s compudobby box gets back from AVL…hopefully by Friday, otherwise early next week!
