This came off the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the garnet shawl. I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep shade of eggplant.

The draft was my first attempt at network drafting, for which I had lots of generous help from Bonnie Inouye. Network drafting is a technique for making curved patterns in fabric, made available to the handweaving community by Alice Schlein in her book Network Drafting: An Introduction. It produces complex, curvy patterns with very little effort, and generally produces a very stable cloth.

Weaving the fabric for the jacket was quite a challenge; one of my shafts kept “floating” and so there were numerous flaws in the finished fabric.  But aha, the magic of cutting and sewing: I simply cut around the flaws!  There are a few visible in the finished piece, but on the whole it looks quite nice, better than the fabric did!

I lined the jacket with silk charmeuse, dyed chestnut brown to match the warp.  The pattern is a Butterick pattern, but I don’t recall the pattern number.

This shawl came out of the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the silk and cashmere jacket.  I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm silk/cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″³ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep garnet red.

The inspiration for this color came from a dear friend of mine, who is a Tibetan lama (very unusual for a Caucasian woman) and who had moved to India with her family.  I had offered her some mohair yarn in whatever shade she liked; she asked for a maroon or dark red, as that is the most appropriate shade for a Tibetan lama to wear.

So I mucked about in my dye samples, and finally decided to dye it using mostly red dye, with just a trace of turquoise to tone down the color.

I was absolutely shocked by the resulting shade: a glorious auburn red!  I hated to part with such beautiful yarn, but I had promised it, so I sent it on its way and promptly determined to dye some more!

This was one of my early attempts at network drafting, a very regular pattern resembling the overshot pattern called “orange peel”.  I still like the symmetry.

I beaded it with small amber beads and large garnet foil beads, but I have to warn you: those beads come off!  I’m constantly having to sew them back on.   Next time I use smaller beads!

This is the garnet shawl in its preliminary stages, showing the beads

Another shot of the garnet weft placed against the warp.

Half-woven garnet shawl. Here the pattern shows most clearly!

Larger photo of the garnet shawl

My garnet shawl, beaded.

This came off the same warp as the silk/cashmere jacket and the garnet shawl, and shares the same draft as the garnet shawl.  (I liked the pattern so much I wove a second one!)

Weaving this was a real challenge – for some reason, one of the shafts in my loom was floating, so there are many irregularities in the cloth.  For this reason, I didn’t show it at CNCH (my regional weaving conference), but I still think it’s pretty.

Computer simulation of the pattern, generated by weaving software.

The dyed cashmere/silk weft yarn, shown against the silk warp yarns.

The shawl on the loom.

A photo of the shawl before wet-finishing.