Monday 13 October 2008

More colour weaving

I wanted to take a series of colour photos of two more colour samplers that I've just finished weaving. You may recall that I took lots of photos of the first two, having taken them outside on a sunny day. Since I finished these samplers on Friday we have only had sunshine at times when I am at work. I'd hoped to get photos this morning, but it was particularly grey and dark.

Maybe some other time. I have a few pics here for you, but they are taken with flash which doesn't really do justice to the colours or the texture of the fabric.

However, to start with, my latest "gadget". I tried separately weighted threads for my floating selvedges. They worked a treat. All those soggy, slack and broken selvedge issues gone at once!

These new samplers are one woven in the "shadow weave" pattern from Janet Phillip's sample blanket.



The pattern starts with 3/1 twill which is weft faced (over three threads, under one) then has a balanced section of 2/2 twill before moving into the warp faced 1/3 twill. Here's a closer look:


Both the above photos were taken on the loom, weaving progresses from bottom of the picture up.

Once again, the distinctive bunches of three warp threads from the threading of groups of 3 threads in the reed, once more sett at 30 epi, went when the cloth was off the loom, washed and ironed.


I picked this section of the cloth because in the plain weave I liked the combination of orange and lilac threads. It was subtle and interesting. In the 2/2 twill it was still quite good. In the above cloth, I really don't like it.

Photos of my other plain weave sampler will have to wait for good light. I had lots of fun doing stripes of alternate colour in different widths, and ended up with a section for which I ordered in more yarns so I could use white, light grey, dark grey and black weft stripes to show up colour value. More on why I did this and how it worked another time.

2 comments:

Peg in South Carolina said...

Lovely weaving. Thank you for sharing. I wind my floating selvedge warps onto knitting bobbins and then hang netal weights onto it. You are right---weighting them individually makes a big difference. This is because the takeup is different on those ends than on the rest of the ends.

Anonymous said...

I love this effect! I used it for one of my Bradford scarves and got completely addicted. If you thread your twill in two 4-shaft blocks then you can have one "fading in" as the other is "fading out" - hours of visual fun.