I seem to be coming out of my wedding-induced creative doldrums, so have decided to take on a new project.  This will be a series of three doubleweave shawls on one warp, plus some extra for sampling.  It will be four-color doubleweave, and here are the colors I’ll start with:

I’m still mulling over which colors to use for the warp.  This is important since the warp will stay the same throughout the three shawls, so it has to coordinate well with my potential wefts.  Also, the warp colors will (mostly) not appear at the same time, so I need to choose which two colors I’ll never have appearing together.  I’m inclined to do turquoise and orange.  They’ll harmonize well (I think) with my other thought for weft, the fuchsia-gradually-fading-to-turquoise that I dyed for the Ocean Sunset series.  But turquoise and gold might work well too, and provide better contrast between the warps.

Next question is what yarn to use.  By my calculations, I’ll need to dye about 400g of each color (9.5-yard warp to allow for sampling, 20″wide x  60 epi = 1200 threads in doubleweave, 2/28 nm yarn at 7000 ypp).  800 grams total.  I’ve got three options for yarn – a very lustrous mill-end silk, the 30/2 silk I used for my dye samples, and a 75/25 silk/cashmere mill-end.

I’m thinking I will use the lustrous mill-end.  I had been saving it for a special use, since it’s so pretty, but since I’ve only got 1.2 kg of it, there really isn’t enough of it to dye a gradual color change series.  So it’s probably better to use it up now and reclaim the space (it’s on lots of small cones, making it a space hog).  I’ve got 6 pounds of the silk/cashmere, which is enough to do graduation dyeing, and I want to reserve the 30/2 silk in case I need to make more dye samples.  (It’s what I’ve been using so far, and consistency is essential when making a sample set.)

So today I will wind two 400g skeins, and tomorrow (after tapestry lessons) I’ll do the dyeing.  Teresa is right – I need to wind down the dyeing a week before the wedding (I do wear gloves but splashes happen), so best to do it now!

Finally, I have started playing around with the design in Fiberworks PCW.  I’m going to design it in blocks, so I’m using a profile draft to show me the overall “look” before I design the drawdown.  This will do two useful things: (1) teach me how to design and use a profile draft, and (2) teach me about block doubleweave.  Pat and I  have been corresponding a bit about it, and I think I’m gradually starting to understand, but this will be a useful learning exercise.

Here are my profile-draft doodles so far:

The blocks will be 8 shafts each (which will allow me to do 4-shaft patterns on top and bottom), so I will only have 3 blocks to play with.  So there are three blocks in the “threading” of the profile draft.

The rest is as you see!  It’s only a doodle so far, I need to sit down and really think about pattern.  I need to go reread Bonnie Inouye’s articles in WeaveZine about making curves, as I think a wavy pattern would be interesting on the same threading.

So much to learn!   So much to experiment with!  Life is way, way, way too short.