All for Knot
Another New Year. Another trip around the sun. Time for a new Sun, Moon and Stars.
Here's a rough sketch of the new design, with a representation of how I want the layer color exchange to happen (click on the picture for full view). The actual woven yardage color is nuanced by the weft color 50% so the colors here are more pure than the final product will be so I never can know exactly how it will all come out in the end, and there's the rub - if I did, it would certainly take all the fun out of it. But this is my third time trying to design an effect of movement in the colors of the warp through lining up particular hues in the top and bottom warps, and I think I am slowly getting the hang of how to tweak it. For example, I noticed in the pieces that came off the last warp that where similar hues lined up, it created welcome areas of no visual pattern, since in this structure of doubleweave, the pattern shows when the bottom warp is brought up to the surface in a field of the top warp, and if it is the same color as the surrounding background, no pattern is readily visible. So I am trying to have more of these moments of rest, or solid color, so as to set off the contrasting pattern areas. The vertical columns in the sketch above represent the 6 six separate sections of warp, dyed to specific measurements in order to allow the layers to line up as planned in the watercolor. For example, if you move your cursor horizontally from the blue and yellow warp section just to the right of the sketchbook binding over to the neighboring blue, yellow orange and red warp, you'll find a spot where blue meets blue, and if I did my measurements right, those two warps will end up one on top of the other, creating a solid blue area in the final woven piece. We shall see.....
So by Christmas, I had the 14 yard sections wound out, mordanted and dyed to the specs in the sketch and now here they are, all wound onto the loom corners out of the way while I knot the ends onto the old warp, left on the loom from the last go round to save the threading of the heddles so I don't have to re-thread the pattern.
Knotting 1824 threads to 1824 other threads should keep me busy for a few weeks, and then on to the winding on of the nearly dread-locked, felted warp lengths ....but let's not get ahead of ourselves.