I dyed the second half of the knitted blank yesterday, and wove up part of it on my lunch hour. This one I did not do in regular stripes, instead I did it in blobs of color.
The intent was to provide more organic shapes than straight lines. The first blank, which you may recall looked like this:
This blank looked great in the small sample I’d woven, but after about four inches it was clear it was turning into very small, repetitive stripes, very predictable order:
It’s not a bad pattern, just not what I had been hoping for. So I dyed the second blank like this:
and here is a photo of roughly what it looks like woven up:
(I know, I know, it’s a rotten picture. I have got to figure out how to get that SLR camera working, but life is so short and there is so little time…!)
At any rate, bad photography aside, it’s much closer to what I was looking for – the colors are softer and more organic, and the overlapping colors are not as bad as I thought they’d be:
You can see some sections where shots of red are alternating with shots of yellow, and it’s a little disruptive, but because the overall pattern is fairly “busy” to start with, it isn’t super obvious. Instead it appears as a Monet-like texturing of the color.
I like this approach a lot better – there’s more variation and it’s more interesting. It’s also something that can only be done using a knitted blank, whereas I realized (after the fact) that the first blank (stripes) was only mimicking what could be done with a handpainted skein if you got the length of the skein right. Notice how much more organic the color flow is in the second version, whereas it is very regular, almost rigid in the first version!
Not that that is necessarily bad – just not what I wanted for this shawl. I do plan to weave up another shawl in pattern #1, against a black background, with an undulating twill pattern, and call it “Tiger Stripes”. I think woven up that way, it will be VERY attractive.
