Tien Chiu

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Ocean Sunset II

before-wet-finishing

This was a variation on the Ocean Sunset shawl, except that I made it with a knitted blank!

Knitted blanks are an interesting concept taught to me by Nancy Roberts of Machine Knitting to Dye For.  You knit up a rectangular piece of fabric, dye it, and then unravel it and reuse the yarn.  Using this technique you can get gradual color changes WITHOUT having  to dye a zillion skeins, and you can get other effects as well (see the “Crazy Colors” shawl for an example).  In this case, I dyed a single blank a gradual change from yellow to red and back again to see what would happen when I wove it up!

I am of mixed minds about this shawl.  I don’t like the boldness of the lines near the bottom of the shawl, but I like the idea of the gradual color change.  I think I may try this idea again, but with a simpler pattern.

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black jewel

Closeup of the center pattern for Black Jewel

This shawl, which is one of my favorites, is woven on a 2/28 nm silk warp dyed in 29 colors, with a black cashmere yarn of about the same weight as weft.  The colors are so close to each other that visually they are almost indistinguishable, producing a very nice gradual fade from turquoise to fuchsia and back again.

This kind of gradual color change has been so successful that I am embarking on a new adventure: dyeing a full color wheel in 60/2 silk, in gradually changing colors!  I estimate that it will take about 120 skeins to get all the way around the color wheel, but fortunately I have enough 60/2 silk on hand that I can do it.  Then I can REALLY play!

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ocean sunset shawl

Photo courtesy Joe Decker, of Rockslide Photography
Photo courtesy Joe Decker, Rockslide Photography

This shawl came off the same warp as three other shawls, “Ocean Sunset II”, “Black Jewel”, and “Crazy Colors”.  (Click here to see the others.)  The shawl is made from 2/28 nm silk hand-dyed (by me!) in 60 colors – 29 in the warp and 21 in the weft.  It is woven in stripes, each stripe so similar in color to its neighbors that the transition appears seamless.  There are 58 stripes in the warp and far more in the weft.  Each warp stripe is only 1/2″ wide!

The pattern for this weft is displayed in the gallery thumbnails – it’s a network drafted pattern on 24 shafts, on a 4-shaft rosepath network.  As you can see, it’s a complex design, but I liked it a lot.  Woven, I think it’s maybe a little “busy” with all the color changes, but it’s still one of my favorite pieces.  Laid straight out it looks a bit stripey, but as you can see, it looks beautiful when rumpled (as it would be if you were wearing it)!  I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on this shawl.