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Sunday, July 13, 2008

On to the Next Design

All of the Fire Series scarves are now woven, but not finished. I've accumulated a stack of things that need their fringes plied, so it's going to be a while before the latest scarves are fringed, washed, and pressed. The scarves with the multicolor weft and the metallic weft are first in the queue, and I'll post pictures as soon as they're ready to pose.

In the meantime, I'm on to the next warp. I decided it should be another in the Feather Series, and was planning to try a Blue Jay colorway. We have two types here, the common Scrub Jay and the sassy Stellar's Jay. I had a design on the computer using navy blue, dark charcoal grey, and light blue-grey, which I quite liked. Then DH said "I seem to remember that the hummingbird colorway was pretty popular, why not do another run in those colors instead?"

So the dyepots suddenly took a different turn, and here's what I've got, dyed with Lanaset/Sabraset dyes on 60/2 silk:



Emerald green (using 3 parts lemon yellow to 1 part turquoise), blue (using equal parts turquoise and royal blue), and blue-violet (3 parts violet to 1 part royal blue). The weft colors will be black, dark green, dark grey, red-violet, and medium green - but the latter two are still cooling their heels in the dyepot, so aren't ready to pose for the camera quite yet.

There will be 2 cones of each warp color, to be wound 6 at a time on the warping wheel. The sett will be 72 epi, sleyed 6/dent in a 12-dent reed. With 6 ends wound together, I get a 3x3 cross. The color difference makes it easy to grab the right thread out of each group of 3 in the proper order.

The threading is a 3-color echo weave based on an advancing Dornick-style twill, which will have blue for the selvedges and 3 colors alternating thread by thread in the pattern area. Here's a screenshot showing part of the pattern, which creates feather shapes.

2 comments:

Bev said...

The colors are lovely and I love the undulating-type twill. Do you keep a dye book? Or do you just know the formula for favorite colors from years of previous dye experience?

Beryl Moody said...

I've often thought of doing a Stellar's Jay piece myself. Their colors are spectacular aren't they. Interesting that you have both species living together.

The next series of scarves looks very interesting. Hope that you didn't irritate the fire gods by doing a wildfire series though:-)