I’ve decided to do a jacket and two shawls on the next warp, which will be medium brown and dark brown in alternating stripes 100 threads (2.5″) wide, woven with gold, orange, red, black, or beige wefts – haven’t decided yet.  I’ve dyed half the warp a gorgeous warm brown and will tackle the other half tomorrow.  I plan to thread it up in one of my network drafted bookmark patterns, weave about half a yard of samples, and then decide what colors to use.  Fortunately I have plenty of leftover red-orange-gold silk yarns, so I can do a good bit of sampling.  Maybe even enough for a shawl.

And here are bad photos of some not very prettybookmarks:

Some of the color combinations are atrocious, but I value them anyway – I never knew what happened when you mixed orange and dull green, and now I know.  I like the pattern in the orange-and-purple bookmark, and may wind up using that one for the network drafted jacket.  Again, it’s still all up in the air.

Off to dinner!

I must be coming down sick, because pretty much all I’ve done the last day is sleep.  Eight hours at night, plus four or five hours of naptime during the day.  Since this is what my immune system does to me when it’s fighting off something, it’s probably Mike’s cold that is flattening me.  I hope my immune system manages to fend it off so I don’t have to suffer through it.  A few days of sleep is much better than a week’s worth of cold.

I have woven a couple of bookmarks!  Alas, no photos yet (until I cut them off the loom) but thus far I have woven indigo blue, royal purple, violet, gold, yellow, kelly green, and gray-green as weft.  Since I don’t have enough of any one color to make an entire bookmark (only about 21 yards of two strands of embroidery floss, which does about 4″), I’ve been using two colors in each bookmark, one for top/bottom and one for the center.

I’m very glad I decided to weave the bookmarks, because I can’t imagine WHAT I was thinking when I selected an orange warp for shawls.  Orange is a very strong color, and while it does transmogrify somewhat based on what you weave with it, it remains very notably orange.  Blending orange with purple, while it doesn’t look bad, doesn’t produce an effect you’d want to wear – looks OK in bookmarks or on a small scale, but is way too loud for a scarf.  The gold and orange weave looks fantastic, and I plan to try red and orange shortly, but I think the palette of colors that will look good with it is limited.  Black, yellow/gold, red, brown will probably about cover it.  Oh well, live and learn.

I haven’t quite decided yet whether to go on using orange, with a more limited color palette, or whether to redye the warp skeins to black and use various bright jewel tones to weave with.  If they were still skeined, I’d toss them back into the dyepot instantly; it’s just the prospect of having to reskein, dye, and (worst) infinitely re-wind into balls that’s making me hesitate.  But I imagine it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Network drafting, however, is turning out fabulously well.  The patterns are beautiful and distinctive, with areas of plainweave, 3/1, 2/2, and 1/3 twill creating fluid designs.  Each treadling/tieup setup produces notably different designs – they all have the same symmetry and look related, but are clearly distinguishable from each other.  I think it’s gorgeous.

Oh, and the colors are iridescent, too – they change depending on the angle at which you view the fabric.  I’ve read about iridescence in weaving, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action.  Neat!

Off to go back to bed.  Hopefully in a few days I’ll stop hibernating.

Well, it appears I’m catching Mike’s cold.  I’ve been sleeping 10+ hours/day, which is usually a sign that I’m coming down with something – my body shuts me down for a couple days so my immune system can get cracking.  It’s too bad really – I would have loved a few more unencumbered days to weave, weave, weave!

I got the loom warped for the bookmarks today – using the weights to tension the warp made things way faster.  No stopping every eight inches to tension the warp, no tangles whatsoever – just wind on, stopping every 5-6 feet to reposition the weight.  I tied the warp kitestick to a 2.5 gallon jug of water and wound on that way.  Then it was a simple matter of threading, sleying, and tying on – with only 100 threads to contend with, that was quick and easy.

And here is the first baby bookmark:

I’ve been weaving them in embroidery thread (left over from my dye experiments) – two strands of embroidery thread is roughly (I think) equivalent weight to the 3/50 Loro Piana I’m using for warp.  Thus far I’ve discovered that high contrast is good – in purple and orange, the pattern shows up nicely; in magenta and orange, it’s much more subtle.

More colors, and color experiments, tomorrow.

So, I’ve definitely decided to make a run of bookmarks, to experiment both with network drafting and with color mixing.  For warp I’m going to use the orange silk (haven’t yet decided whether to use light orange or dark orange or both one after another), for weft I’m going to use two strands of cotton embroidery floss in a dizzying array of colors left over from my dye samples.  (I knew they were going to be useful somehow!)  I figure this should give me both an idea of how the network drafted patterns are going to look when woven up, and an idea of what exactly happens when you combine orange with all sorts of different colors.  Things like orange and green, which I would never dare essay in a full-size shawl (what if it didn’t work?) won’t look nearly so garish in a bookmark, I think.

It will also give me a chance to try a new method of warping that Joanne Hall of Glimakra suggested: weighting the warp as it’s wound onto the loom to keep tension on it and speed up the process.  If it works, it’ll change winding the warp onto the back beam from a tedious, several-hour process to just a few minutes, so I’m really eager to see how it works. If that fails, I’ll try another method that people have recommended, warping with a trapeze.

But first I have to finish weaving off the warp from the cocoon jacket, which I expect to take a couple more days, and do this jewelrymaking intensive course today and tomorrow.  I’m not quite sure what we’re learning in this followup class, but I imagine it’ll be way cool.