Done!

I was so eager to see the finished shawl that I stayed home last night, skipping my guild meeting (three months in a row – what WILL they think of me??) and weaving like a maniac, then hemstitching the shawl, cutting it off, and….

TA-DAA!

And here are some closeups:

Now for my critique:

First, I think there’s too much going on in the shawl.  The horizontal striping distracts from the color changes in the background, and the switches from 1/3 to 3/1 twill masks in the squares effectively hide the smooth color changes in the pattern.  Having spent so long laboring to make those color changes smooth, I also want the overall effect to feature them prominently!  So that is too bad, and I will avoid it in the next shawl.

Second, the colors are too bright and too large scale.  I put it on me, and the bright colors, coupled with the sheer size of the shawl, were a bit overwhelming, especially 0n the orange side.  If I were to redo it, I would either make the blocks smaller, the shawl narrower and shorter, or tone down the colors.

Third, there are a number of technical issues (mostly skips) in the blue side, which is a pity, because that’s the side I like better!  Most of those are due to my early loom woes, though, and once I got the loom working correctly, there are very few skips.  I’ve also learned to spot them as they happen, so there are fewer towards the end.

Overall, I like this shawl, though I don’t think it will be one of my favorites.

So what next?

I think I’m going to weave this pattern again, but with solid color warp and weft, and see what that looks like.  For my third shawl on this warp (I put on enough for three shawls), I’m going to eliminate the color variation in the background and in the blocks, and just use the color gradient wefts.  I think it will look better that way.

Curiously enough, my reaction to the finished shawl is very similar to my reaction to the Photoshop simulation, even though I liked the sample better.  So perhaps Photoshop is better than I’d thought, for simulations anyway!

Off to cook some food!  I’ve been so busy in the weaving studio that I wound up eating hardboiled eggs for dinner.  Time to make some “real” food so I don’t starve to death during the next weaving madness.