It came to me in a dream.
I had been puzzling over what to do with my half of the qiviut, since I don’t wear scarves but do wear shawls. As I was waking up this morning, I dreamily confused a beautiful doubleweave scarf that Ruth Blau had shown off at our little get together yesterday with my qiviut scarf.
Ruth’s scarf, which was positively brilliant, had two layers of different widths – one wider black layer and one narrower, painted-warp layer. The narrow, brighter layer alternated sides to produce an attractive windowed effect on either side – windows of color against a black background. I really loved the look.
So then I thought, what if I did a shawl in doubleweave, with a narrow strip of white-silk-and-qiviut running down the center? With a black background, white silk, and brownish-gray qiviut, that would be quite striking. I could add some inlay on the sides of the black layer if desired, to give a little more visual “jazz” to the design.
But then, what about the back? I didn’t really want to do windows, I liked the idea of having a solid center design down one entire length of the shawl.
Then I thought, perhaps I could do triple weave in the center, and have two layers of the white silk and qiviut, one on either side, possibly blending into a single layer with the black in the center. (Pat Stewart does wonderful work in that vein, and was kind enough to show me how she does it. I haven’t seen her work online, but it’s beautiful, inspirational stuff.) The qiviut is fine enough (7000 ypp) that I think three layers would still drape OK.
This idea intrigues me enough that I will probably go back and work out the draft for it. I don’t know how it would work in practice, but since I still have six days of vacation left, I have to fill in the time somehow! And this strikes me as intriguing enough to try.
