I’ve been in Mexico for a month and a half now. In that time, surprisingly, I’ve done almost no exploration of my surroundings. That’s because most of my voyaging has been internal – so Mexico is mostly serving as a place to cocoon. (I’d like to come back sometime when I’m actually interested in exploring!)

What’s changed?

Mostly, I’ve been listening to the silence. Helping my wife through her transition took a lot of energy and emotional space. I don’t blame her for that, but now that I’m not so intensively involved, I’m enjoying the silence of a house entirely to myself – of having “a room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf so famously put it. No cats, no spouse, no responsibilities to anyone else. That’s precious, and I’ve been enjoying it. I can feel myself decompressing.

The other major change is that I’ve committed to putting my creative life first. First thing in the morning, as soon as I get up, I’m spending at least an hour on my creative work. Early morning is my best time of day for me – most alert, most creative, most courageous – and “paying myself first” ensures that my creative work gets the time it needs. If it waits until everything else is done, it never happens – that’s what’s been happening the last ten years. Enough.

As a result, I’ve actually started creating again. That’s HUGE. Ideas and designs for new work are pouring out, and I expect to start weaving some really cool stuff once I get home. Probably in February – January will get eaten by moving and studio setup logistics.

But meanwhile, I am creating again.

Since the next step in Unraveling requires equipment I don’t have here, and I don’t want to launch another jacquard project to distract me from Unraveling, I’ve started designing projects for shaft looms.

I’m considering teaching a class at the Handweaving Academy about designing from a photo. That’s something lots of people would love to do, and it can be tricky, so I think it’s a worthy topic for a class.

So I’ve spent the last few days designing a piece inspired by this Monet painting:

I picked this one because I’m thinking of doing a series of photos with vastly different styles, to give examples of how to create different effects and moods. To start, I wanted a photo with subtle color blends and blurry edges.

I searched Handweaving.net’s draft collection and found an overshot draft that reminded me of flowers and rippling water (#61448, by Gerd Lindman Nilsson).

I set to work.

Because the original photo has a lot of blues, greens, and whites in it, I decided to make the background blue-green and the lilies mostly white. I had a lot of options for color – overshot consists of a ground cloth (tabby) plus a pattern weft. That meant that I could create stripes of color lengthwise (warp) and TWO different color patterns crosswise (pattern + tabby weft). Lots of potential (and also very complicated).

My first explorations produced this:

This would be a nightmare to weave, but I thought it captured the spirit of the lilies nicely. Each lily is slightly different, which I felt created a more flowing, painterly effect.

I decided I wanted to explore color combinations in greater depth, so I spent a half-day yesterday creating this monstrosity:

This is obviously not intended as a final design. What it does do, however, is set up all the color patterns that I might want to use, making it easier to experiment with colors later. I’ve set up color gradients in the warp and both wefts, each composed of different colors. So experimenting with color combinations becomes easy – I simply use Handweaving.net’s Draft Editor to replace the colors in each section, so it takes only a minute or two to swap in different colors.

After I finished creating this color template (which took several hours – it’s complicated!), I started fiddling with color replacements. By bedtime, I’d gotten to this design, which I like (and which would be much simpler to weave!).

This isn’t a finished design – I want to tone down the pink a LOT (the painting’s lilies are mostly white), reduce the saturation, darken the blue/green areas, make the colors cooler, and quite a few other tweaks. (I liked the colors in the first version better.) But overall, I like where I’m going.

(This version is also much easier to weave, which is important because I’m thinking of submitting it to a magazine – it needs to be within reach for most weavers!)

I’m envisioning a set of napkins, in 10/2 cotton with a doubled 10/2 cotton pattern weft. Using two strands of yarn, side by side, opens up the possibility of using two different colors together for even more subtle blends. It might also enable me to simplify the weaving without compromising the painterly feel.

Once I’m satisfied with the colors, I’ll have to go home and test the real-life yarn colors in the design. For now, I can fiddle with theoretical colors on the screen, to see what overall color combinations I like best. Then sample and finalize the design once I’m home.

I fly home in just under three weeks, so my sojourn is nearing it’s end. I’m good with that – I’ve enjoyed my trip, and the solitude, but I feel like I’m almost done cocooning. I’m ready to weave again.