painted warp – Page 6

I took a few quick shots before preparing to launch it into the Great Unknown of CNCH:

The first shows most of the shawl, the second shows the beaded fringe.

I’m very pleased with it – the gold foil sets off the tan/gold warp and the overall effect is of antique gold and rubies. The big garnet beads match perfectly, and the amber accent beads are nice as well. I really should have photographed it against something light-colored so the beads would show up more distinctly, but B. is in the bed right now and I don’t have any other horizontal surface that isn’t covered in stuff! So this will have to do for now.

This and the brown/tan jacket are both going off to the Black Sheep Guild’s exhibit booth on computer-assisted weaving. I hope it will inspire some people to see computer-assisted weaving as an art form and not as “cheating” (which some people apparently do. beats me why.).

I am debating entering the tiger eye shawl in one of the judged galleries – haven’t decided yet. If I do, it will have to be re-hemmed, as the hem is sloppily machine-hemmed. I was too impatient to get started. 🙂

Meanwhile, I have inspected the painted warp. It looks glorious except for one thing – where I tied the choke ties, the warp is still white. I knew that was going to happen when I painted it – unfortunately I had already soaked the yarns when I realized the error of tying tight choke ties – but it is still distressing. It will definitely not be the “perfect project” I’ve been seeking, but, well – let’s see how it looks on the loom. I think it will be OK for casual wear, but I could just weep at the white spots in an otherwise beautifully colored warp. Next time I will tie loose ties instead of tight choke ties.

Oh well. It will still look fine from five feet away, I guess. It’s just that I’m seeking perfection.

Since I can’t start weaving again for at least another week, and there’s only so much staring-at-a-computer-screen one can do at a time, I’ve started planning my next project. This will be some painted-warp yardage for an AIDS Lifecycle outfit, with colors inspired by Sara Lamb’s “Special Trims for a Silk Kimono” article out of Weaver’s 39. She used fuschia, blue, purple, and orange for her kimono, which is glorious handspun silk in plainweave. Lacking the time to handspin that much silk yardage, and wanting more glitter than the silk I have, I’ve decided to weave this particular fabric in handpainted 20/2 tencel. (You may recall that I bought some from Webs awhile ago.)

Sara used a warp-emphasis plainweave for her kimono, but since I’ve been unable to weave a good plainweave on Lady Di (possibly because of the cable problems, so that may be fixed now), and because something in me just won’t settle for a structure so simple, I think I’m going to weave it in 5-shaft satin. Satin is warp-faced on one side, which will let the glorious warp colors show, and the yarn is fine enough that a four-thread float isn’t going to catch on things.

I’m going to use two different painted warps, the primary warp in bright shades, fuschia/orange/blue/purple, and the secondary warp in just blue/purple, alternating in stripes. This will break up the horizontal stripes of the primary warp and give a bit more motion to the finished garment. (It will also make it visually “busy” enough that I won’t have to worry much about matching stripes in the garment.)

I will probably thread the main warp on shafts 1-10 and the secondary warp on shafts 11-15, both to spread things out a bit and to allow me to control the weave structures separately if I feel so inspired. With fifteen shafts, I can do three blocks of satin, which gives me enough leeway to play around once I finish the necessary yardage for the garment.

I’m not entirely sure about the sett. The formula in Sharon Alderman’s book gives sett S = (W*R)/(I+R) where W= wraps per inch, R = # of threads in each repeat, I = number of intersections between warp and weft in each repeat. 20/2 tencel has 68 wraps per inch (according to Halcyon Yarn’s website), and a 5-shaft satin has a 5-thread repeat with 2 intersections per repeat. Doing the math, that comes out to a sett of about 49.

But wait! Alderman goes on to say that, for slippery yarns (tencel being very slippery), you want to increase the sett by 10-15%. So that yields a theoretical sett of 54-57.

For my weave structure, I want my raddle groups to be a multiple of 5, so repeats of the pattern stay within each raddle group rather than “jumping” into a new raddle group. My raddle has 1/4″ spacing, so ideally the sett would be a multiple of 4*5=20. The closest value is 60, so I think I’m going to try a slightly denser-than-suggested sett and sett it at 60 epi. At that sett it may not beat square, but that’s not really an issue with satin and I don’t care if it comes out a little more warp-faced; a slightly stiffer fabric will also be better for garments, so I think 60 epi will do.

I’ll start winding the warp either tonight or tomorrow, in between studying up on web design. I’ll also start investigating patterns for AIDS Lifecycle outfits. Next weekend, if it isn’t raining, I’ll paint the warp.

Whee! The world contains FAR too many interesting things to do.

Finished, beaded garnet shawl

The painted-warp project