Yesterday I wove up the rest of the bookmark.  I also had the delight of discovering eight partial cones of cashmere yarn from Colourmart on my doorstep when I returned from shopping!  If you aren’t familiar with Colourmart, they specialize in remainders from the top Italian (etc.) mills – you can get top-quality cashmere, silk, merino, and occasionally alpaca, mohair, and even vicuna yarns from them at less than 50% of retail.  If you order large quantities, sometimes you can get discounts even on their already-discounted prices.

Anyway, I had written Richard and his happy crew asking if I could have some of his “odds ‘n ends” from the 2/72 nm and 2/46 nm.  So I got eight partial cones, four of each weight, all in different colors.

And I wove up this rendition of the chrysanthemum, using the 2/72 nm cashmere:

Much more subtle than the versions woven in brighter colors:

The first two crests are woven in rayon machine embroidery thread, the third (top) one is woven in a tencel/silk mix at 12,000 yards per pound.  You can see that the machine embroidery thread, while beautiful, is a little too fine: the crest, which is supposed to come out circular, is more of a flattened oval.  The tencel/silk mix, on the other hand, is too thick, stretching the circle into a long ellipse.  The 2/72 cashmere is almost precisely correct, only slightly flattened.  I have the feeling that 60/2 silk would be just perfect.

And here are the bookmarks:

I rather like the back; it doesn’t have the high contrast between puzzle pieces and background, but it has a cheery colorfulness that appeals to me.  But then, I like color.

The drape of the taquete pieces is very supple, and it has enough body to make a decorative shawl.  The cashmere is, as expected, super soft.  I’m pretty sure I won’t weave up the 2/72 nm cashmere into a shawl, but I’m wondering whether the 2/46 nm cashmere would work.  I think it is likely too thick, but it comes in lots of fairly bright colors, so is more appealing as a choice.  Silk might work out better, especially since I have loads of silk.  I’m also negotiating for some white silk tram (a VERY loosely twisted reeled silk) and may get some in a few weeks.  The stuff isn’t very durable (tends to fuzz) but it is very pretty, maybe good for a decorative shawl that doesn’t get worn all the time.

Anyway, I am pleased with my first taquete samples – now I’m just groping for a design that catches my fancy sufficiently to weave up some yardage!  I am getting the hang of weaving with four shuttles, so am working at about double or even triple my initial speed – I’m guessing about 8″ per hour.  That is still fairly slow – a 72″ shawl would take me about 9 hours of weaving time – but by no means impossible.  I think I could do it in about a week.

Dye-wise, I have a bit of a conundrum.  I have finished my second batch of samples, but I am suffering from what I suspect may be a little bit of RSI (repetitive stress injury, for the curious) in my left arm.  As a result, I’m trying to avoid doing things with my left arm, which makes winding the cards difficult.  At the same time, I really really really want to see how close my new samples are, so I do want to wind at least a couple of cards.  I think I may approach it in five or ten minute chunks, with frequent breaks, and quit if I start having any discomfort whatsoever.  RSI is nothing to be trifled with – I have friends who have literally had to quit their jobs because of it.  And while I’m not as high-risk as, say, a software engineer, I still do a lot of typing in my profession.  So I am trying to take things easy.

I finished weaving the puzzle sampler last night, and have been examining it closely this morning, as the results are quite interesting.  Here is a photo, which you would be well advised to click and take a closer look at (warning: it’s about 1 MB, so if you’re on dialup, that may take awhile):

Several things strike me as interesting here:

First, coverage is significantly better with two wefts and at its best with three wefts.  The black weft largely does not show in mixes, though it does darken the tone slightly (see the two magenta center pieces; the bottom one is a single strand of magenta, the one in the middle of the sampler has one strand of magenta and one of black, and is slightly darker in tone as a result).  I will weave up another sampler, removing the black, to get a better idea of blended effects.

Once you get up to three wefts on top (one on bottom), some interesting color effects start happening.  In the top middle piece, the outer edges are reddish purple and the interior is yellow-orange.  Why?  It’s because, in the adjoining pieces, the yellow weft is on bottom.  In the transition to the multicolor puzzle piece, yellow starts out mostly underneath the red, then transitions to being mostly on top of the red.  The result is multiple colors.  This does not seem to be consistent, though, as it doesn’t show up in all three-color puzzle pieces.  Obviously there is something happening here which I don’t fully understand, but one thing is fairly obvious: you cannot use three wefts on top and one on bottom and expect all three wefts to show consistently.  One will tend to slide under the others and be less visible.

So I have learned a lot in just a few short hours!

Now I will finish the bookmarks (which are essentially two repetitions of the sampler) and then weave the sampler again, this time with a different color (green?) instead of the black.  I want to get a better idea of what happens in three-color blends and it is difficult to do that when one of your wefts disappears!

I woke up this morning and realized that some sections of the puzzle sampler draft look identical, because of my choice of colors for that draft.  Here is a better rendition:

And here is a closeup (click to see the full version), so you can see what’s going on.  The first four puzzle pieces are a single weft, the next six are all combinations of two wefts, and the last four are three wefts on top.  Should make for interesting weaving – if I choose my colors carefully!