Finally! Back to Weaving!

After at least 10 days of nonweaving tasks (getting ready for ACC, working ACC, recovering from ACC, finishing up paperwork re ACC...) I've been able to get back to the loom.

I'm weaving away on the so-called "color change" shawls. Several people who stopped by the booth at ACC asked if I meant the UV-sensitive yarn that changes color in sunlight, so I guess my term is misleading. Anyway, the weft is a variegated yarn that has extremely long segments of color.

Here's a closeup, taken after I'd woven almost 1,000 picks (at ~36 picks per inch):



When I started the shawl, the weft was green for quite a while - at least 6 inches of weaving. Then it shifted to a bronzy green for several more inches of weaving, then back to green, and now it's a grey-violet-blue-ish color.

Here's a picture of the weaving with the shuttle sitting on top so you can see how long the color lasts on the pirn before it changes:



This is cool stuff! I can't wait to see how it looks off the loom! Patience, Sandra, you've got a long way to go before that'll happen.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the pirns in order after winding yarn off the ball onto a cone and then onto 4 pirns. (My AVL pirn-winder runs so fast, it's not possible to wind directly from the ball onto a pirn. As it was, I had to stop several times to unscramble the yarn while I wound slowly from the ball onto a cone.)

I ended up making a sketch so I could visualize the sequence. As I thought, to keep the color order right, the last pirn wound becomes the first pirn woven. I'm on pirn #2 now, and probably will nearly finish the last pirn just about the time my measuring tape says it's time to stop. That is, if my calculations are anywhere in the realm of reality...