Polishing Wood (Designs, That Is)

I think I've finally got a weave draft that will give me the wood-grain texture I want. With a given threading, I can vary the design with a different tie-up and treadling for each scarf in a 5-piece run. The warp and weft yarns are hand-dyed, using dyes derived from wood. See Playing with Sawdust, below, for shots of the yarns and information about wood dyes.

Here are screen captures of the first three designs in the series. My weaving software (WeaveIt Pro) does a very good job of rendering the designs so I can visualize the woven cloth.



I wanted a design that would evoke the surface of a piece of wood, whether the grain of a slab of oak or curly maple, or the saw marks on a rough-sawn piece of timber.



The threading for this series is an interleaved nonparallel threading. Two different design lines are interleaved thread by thread. Each design line is threaded in a different color, one tan, one darker brown. By changing the treadling and the weft color for each piece in the series, I end up with 5 scarves that are each one-of-a-kind, even though they share the same warp yarns and threading.



Two more different treadlings, and I'm ready to go. In the meantime, I'll get the warp yarns beamed and threaded.