I wove fairly obsessively yesterday, and got through three of four-and-a-half pirns. I’m at the three-foot mark, so I’m actually a bit over half done.
Here is a pic of the woven sample:
It’s looking good! There is some subtle striation that adds “texture” to the colors – like the horizontal stripes in sandstone. Not as much striation as I would like, though, so maybe I’ll try for blobbier blobs next time.
Here is a pic of one of the previous blanks that shows the effect I’m after:
This is one of the reasons I’m using a knitted blank (to answer Ruth’s question). If I were weaving with gradually changing stripes, I’d get something more like this:
Also pretty, but not the effect I’m after right now.
The other reason to use a knitted blank is that I do want a smooth progression of color, and my experience has been that stripes produce highly visible horizontal lines unless the colors are VERY close to each other. To get the smooth color gradations in Liquid Fire (the orange piece above), I had to dye twenty shades of red/orange/yellow. With five colors in this piece (gold, orange, red, purple, brown), that would be 100 skeins, which would be more effort than a knitted blank. Swapping out the weft yarns won’t work well because I’m already using a yarn at 15,000 yards per pound – the most I could do would be two strands of 120/2 silk, which would be a pain to wind into skeins, dye, and rewind onto cones. It also wouldn’t let me do the cross-dyed effects I want to introduce later – for that I need wool or cotton, or any natural fiber that isn’t silk!
So I am pretty much stuck with knitted blanks. Hopefully, doubling the length of the row should also halve the time to knit and unravel.
Plans for this weekend include:
- Finish weaving the sample for my Handwoven article
- Weave the knitted blank and test out various cross-dyed color patterns in fiber-reactive dyes
- Go to a class on glasswork on Sunday (it sounded interesting, so what the heck)
- Clean up the studio – major undertaking, probably also a purging of stuff, as I’m running out of “away” to put!
- Start sewing up a new round of muslins, since I’m going to see Sharon next weekend!
argghhh..reading your blog posts is frustrating the heck out of me right now, since it makes me want to get to MY loom and I have to finish these furshlugginer auction socks!!!! Hopefully, by this time next week, they will be done, photographed on the legs of my teenaged sidekick, and on their way to raise some money for a good cause, but, next time I do knee-highs, it’s gonna be thicker yarn!!!!!!! Planned project for the next freezing spell is to learn how to do them on the knitting-machine. I used to do tube sox on it, but, of course, now one wants proper heels and toes….. You can flat-knit and sew them up one side, but, there are also ways, assuming one has a ribber, to do them properly.
congratulations, the cloth is exciting and I am SO glad you took up weaving! You really are becoming a beacon of creative designing!
shine on!!!!!!
Your cloth is beautiful.
Stephanie
I’m curious to see how the cross-dyeing goes. Usually I think of cross dyeing with cellulose vs. protein fibers (dye will take on one but not the other). But silk and wool are both protein–what sort of dye will you use that only affects one of them? of course, silk and wool take up the dye a bit differently, but not as dramatically as, say, silk and cotton.
Inquiring minds want to know–and I’m grateful that I get to watch you do it!