I Live for Days like These

Tuesday's Shaft 8 problem became Wednesday's Shafts 1, 2 and 4 problem, which was easier to fix. Wednesday night Ben took apart and cleaned/lubricated the printer cable plugs, (remember those with gazillion prongs at each end?) which fixed it, at least for now.

Yesterday I wove a small sample, as I wanted to see the interlacement and saturation of colors in the revised hellebore draft, in comparison to all the tied weave samples I did before I rethreaded. It turned out much more saturated. I also chose pinks and purples as weft colors, primarily because I love single hellebores in dark pink/claret to purple to slate (less saturated but darker in value purples) in my garden. 

Today I added a few other wefts, a saturated teal, a Delft blue, and a bright yellow, because I wasn't convinced yesterday's selection had any zing. Now that I've woven some, I can't decide if this was the right decision.

Wefts: pinks, purples, plus three punchy colors; 15 in all. There are 16 motif units in one repeat. I'm not using them in a regular order, but alternating pink and purple more or less; three colors can act as either, and three neither. I've woven one repeat, 2/7 of the first piece, and am thinking of using only pinks and purples for the next one and a half repeat, and then mixing teal, yellow and blue in the last one repeat. 

Sorry, these colors are very inaccurate as I took pics as the sun was going down and coming in directly into the basement, but you can still see how the saturated teal lifts the pinks and purples around it.

Yellow and blue are quite different from the surrounds, and they do give the cloth a zing, but I'm not sure if I like it. 

This is my view as I weave: I have all the samples form this warp hanging in front of me, and you can see how saturated this draft is, (the small piece from about the center to the left,) compared to the previous tied-weave samples. As well, tied weave had 60/2 cotton tabby wefts influencing the pattern weft colors. 

My instinct is to use only friendly, harmonious colors together. But when I see textiles, paper, paintings, etc, with unexpected color giving the work a lift, I admire the effect. My initial selection looked dull and "heavy", so I thought I'd try the technique, but a more conservative approach might have worked better in this case. We'll see. 

There is another; the hellebore flowers are strangely elongated. Each motif is 62 ends wide x 62 picks long, at 42EPI, 20/2 mercerized cotton. Usually when I make square-ish drafts, on the loom they look squashed/flattened, and this could be my very first experience of the shape being longer/thinner than I envisioned. I could edit the draft, or in future, I could change the sett to 39EPI or even 36; this warp, however, at around 62cm on the loom, is as wide as I can weave comfortably so I am not resleying. Because I sampled quite a bit of this warp, I'm hoping to get two longish (240cm?) pieces.

Still, I'm thrilled I'm finally weaving my hellebore flowers in cotton; there is so much I want to do with this I see many more project based on this series of drafts. Also, playing with lovely saturated colors gave me many ideas about a commission piece coming up. I'll tell you about them soon.

I'm also working on a "bold" design for the next tye-dye shirt, but ditched the lacy knitting because the yarns were too fine and delicate, knitting cables was silly/untenable.