Fire Scarves Progressing

In a comment on the last post, Valerie asked where I get my silk. Wherever I can get a good deal on good quality! I prefer the silk yarns from Switzerland and Italy to those from China - fewer knots per cone, and generally more consistent quality.

I wove some more on Fire Series scarf #2, and when I needed a break I went and got the "big" digital camera, a Canon 10Mpx heavyweight. Man, does it ever do a better job on reds!

Here's a view of the first scarf, under the loom on its way onto the cloth storage beam. From this side of the loom, what I see is mostly the purple hills.



From the other side, the rust-red trees are more predominant.



These colors are very close to what my eye sees, with no help from Photoshop. A big improvement over the little camera.

Also, some 2000 picks into scarf #2 of the series, I'm seeing some very interesting visual effects created by the tramm silk weft.

Here's a closeup of the weft spool. Depending what Blogger does to the resolution, you should be able to see the yarn structure, 3 differently-colored plies, each with almost no twist, put together with almost no plying twist. Click to see the biggest version Blogger is willing to display.



When I look at the cloth straight on, with the camera placed only a few inches above the breast beam, I hardly see any woven pattern at all. What I see is wiggly, parallel lines in the warp-wise direction that are created by the color sequence in the weft yarn. Again, click to see the effect more clearly.



From the side, I only see the woven pattern, and don't see the weft as multicolored. Cool! In addition, there's a very high degree of irridescence in this one compared to #1, which I credit to the weft yarn.