Second Wood Scarf Woven

The first few days back at home after a show, I spend all my time putting stuff away, doing laundry, and playing bookkeeper (my favorite part of doing craft shows - yeah, right!). It always takes a few days before I can get back to the loom, and by the time I do manage to squeeze in a few hours of weaving, I'm absolutely itching to throw a shuttle and watch cloth emerge.

Here's scarf #2 in the latest wood series. I started the weaving before the show, and finished it just yesterday.



I always love seeing the pattern emerge. With this lighting, and viewed from this angle, you can see both threading design lines - one a large networked curve, the other a steep networked line. The treadling is another large networked curve, which makes the matching design line in the threading show as big oval shapes, and turns the steep line into parallel wave-like lines. I expect that once the cloth is wet-finished, the designs will appear and disappear depending on viewing angle and lighting.

My weaving software does its best to help me visualize the final cloth, but since hue and value and saturation play such a major role in the appearance of the finished cloth, it's a challenge to give the software the right information so it can show me what to expect. It's a good thing that I welcome surprises - it's okay with me if what I see on the monitor doesn't quite match reality.

Scarf #3 is just a few inches along, so pictures will have to wait until later.

In the meantime, there are jars of wood shavings in the garage busily extracting color. Redwood from DH's recent redwood burl turnings is becoming a wonderful deep red-brown. Red-bark eucalyptus is also hinting at a nice rosy shade. Walnut shavings are promising to be dark, lovely brown, and an unnamed Brazilian hardwood is going to be spectacular. And, wonder of wonders, the buckeye hulls I put in a jar weeks ago is now surrounded by a yellow-green liquid. Whether it will make dye, or just a perfect tannin mordant for cellulose yarns remains to be seen.

And, mirabile dictu, the fragments of an umbilicaria-type lichen I put to soak in ammonia have turned the liquid a brilliant scarlet, so I'll be harvesting as much as possible from the landscaping rocks in our back garden to dye a scarf's-worth of weft.