tiger eye

I picked out a set of colors for the tiger-eye yardage today:

I was all set to use them, and then I decided to run a simulation in Photoshop. I’m glad I did, because this looks NOTHING like what I had in mind:

Mind you, it’s not unattractive, just not what I was envisioning. I wanted a cool, restful look in warm golds, beiges, and browns, and the orange “punches up” the excitement level too much.

What I am looking for is more like my first simulation:

So I took the core colors of the color gradients and put them into a “swatch” image:

Now, of course, I’m stuck. Color matching yarn to a monitor color is tricky to impossible, and my printer mangles colors, so I’m not quite sure how to get from A to B. Obviously it doesn’t have to be a perfect color match, but I’d like it to be close enough to get a similar effect. I am definitely going to have to dye sample skeins for this one! I have a few of the shades in my “library”, but not all.

Which means hauling out the pH meter and my sample skeins, syringes, etc. Just as well – I could use a refresher on precision dyeing. It’s been a couple months since the dye study group, and I want to make sure I don’t get rusty.

Plans for this weekend:

farmer’s market Saturday morning
run up to Sharon’s on Saturday afternoon for final fitting, interfacing evaluation
Stitches West (a knitting convention, but might have interesting yarns) Sunday AM with friends
Sunday PM – dye samples for tiger eye yardage, devise drafts for testing CompuDobby IV upgrade
Monday – drive up to AVL (7 hour round trip), test loom, hopefully take it home!

Yep, looks like a packed weekend.

The last muslin is complete (and yes, the stripes match PERFECTLY!), I’ve taken a day or two for R&R, and now it’s time to launch into the next thing. Any number of things I could do ““ quilt piecing, pattern drafting, fabric manipulation ““ the list goes on and on. But what I’ve decided to do is wind another warp. This one will also be painted, but in much more subtle tones ““ burnt oranges, golden yellow, rust, chocolate brown ““ all the colors of tiger-eye stone. It will have basically the same draft as the rainbow warp ““ which I need to do in order to test the sett using 30/2 silk instead of my custom-spun silk yarn ““ but will look radically different.

Here are two simulations of the possibilities:

I like the staggered stripes better ““ not that they will stay lined up neatly, anyway! In fact, with fewer colors, the odds are that the colors will “pool” at some point. I think that’s OK with me, though.

I haven’t yet decided what to do with this yardage, but I think another jacket may be in the works! Different pattern, of course. Or, I may gift it to Sharon as some small recompense for the help she’s given me. Mostly I just need to weave up another piece using the same draft and 30/2 silk, and I figure I might as well put a long warp on the loom and get a usable length of fabric out of it.

The plan is to wind the warp over the next few days, and then dye it over the weekend. I will probably use Lanaset (acid) dyes with citric acid, and batch it (let it sit at room temperature) for several days to “set” the colors. In this case I’m using acid dyes rather than fiber-reactives, because I will have to mix up some colors and my Lanaset sample set is much more extensive than my Cibacron F sample set. With a more extensive sample set, I can simply look up color combinations, rather than having to figure out the mixes from scratch.

That’s not all I’ll be working on, of course. I still need to develop test drafts to weave on my loom whilst at AVL, and I plan to study pattern drafting some more. I successfully drafted an armhole princess pattern yesterday, and plan to dive into armhole princess variations later this morning.

Pondering colors

Another week, another warp