So I wove eight of the colours into a scarf. I didn't use the green because, as I know now, you have to wind the skein into a ball before you do anything with it. If you try and do anything with a skein it will just go crazy. A useful lesson there. This is the bright green, and it is completely impenetrably tangled. Maybe one day when I have nothing better to do I will untangle it ... but not today.
I wanted to get an idea how every one of the colours wove up with every other one of the colours so I did eight even stripes up the warp and wove about three inches of each on the weft, in the same order. So you can see the rectangles where the warp and weft are the same - from left to right on the picture below it's the brown, the green, the black and the red. There's still a bit of variegation even with one colour because the dye took more in spots than in others. Where you're dyeing cotton, bits of white are an absolute no-no - they look really amateurish and appalling. But with wool it doesn't seem to have the same effect. A bit of undyed or lightly dyed looks quite good.
I took a close up of this bit because I think this is my favourite colour combination - the black and green and brown together. Isn't that unexpected? Yellow is my absolute favourite colour in quilting but it doesn't give the same oomph to weaving (in my extremely limited experience). The blue and pink down the bottom also look lovely together.
You can tell that it is slightly "warp-faced" that is, the warp shows more than the weft. If you look at the pure black rectangle, the one immediately below is red warp, black weft ... and it looks quite red. The rectangle immediately to the right of the pure black rectangle is black warp, red weft ... and it looks quite black. If my weave was perfectly balanced they would both read as much the same colour, and they don't.
So this is the finished product draped over the back of a chair. I plaited the fringe again to make little fat braids, which are very cute. I am definitely going to wear this one. When it was done I "wet finished" i.e. handwashed it, and some colour came out, but not heaps. I will up the rinsing for the next batch, but I wouldn't be terrified to wear it in the rain or anything. I am going to try dyeing variegated skeins next! Different colours!!!! Such fun.
i love it!!!! you did a great job on it!
ReplyDeleteI like it. You cannot stockpile them like quilts, though. Or happily give me eight. I reckon you should have a marketing policy form the beginning so that you can keep on having fun without a mountain growing up behind you.
ReplyDeleteYou can give me eight! And each of your nieces, I'm sure :-) I love that weaving is giving you the same buzz as quilting, and you can use similar but different skills to get amazing results.
ReplyDeleteThat's absolutely lovely and possibly doesn't give you tennis elbow, which I have acquired from hand quilting.
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