Inspiration for weaving design

I'm new to weaving, so this is all subject to change without notice (although I might post about it).

I seem to have two three different classes of inspiration.

First and perhaps obvious is an existing fabric, such as those produced by the Ardlanish weavers. The hand is lovely, the use of natural colours is lovely, and I'm lucky enough to have a couple of small swatches to remind me of how they've achieved some of the effects, for example using the hair from a double-coat Hebridean as an accent against the darker wool.

The second is equally obvious, at least for a handspinner: the yarn itself, such as the cashmere/silk blend in my last post. I spun it as a knitter, but as a baby weaver it seems to me that weaving will do far more to show the subtle variation in colour - such a fine yarn could only have been used for lace knitting, where the contrast generated by the large holes would camouflage the variegation. And combining it with something else will make that yardage go further! Now I idle away the time waiting for Pshop to save big files by running through possibilities for weaving it; if not the possibly-too-harsh wool, what yarn should that be? In my head I dug through the Habu stash and found some bamboo laceweight with incredible sheen - and a cone of stainless steel wire covered with rusty-brown silk.

Thinking about how I could use those with the cash/silk lace took me straight back to Inspiration No. 1, reminding me of a fabric I saw briefly in the Decopur Linen film a couple of years ago; toward the end there's brief mention of a cashmere/linen blend. Now, I understand how difficult it would be to care for such a fabric... and yet it intrigues me. The softness of fine cashmere combined with the crispness of linen. Cashmere that would take and hold a crisp edge? A sheet of softness that would retain a crumpled appearance rather than drape? It could be really, really interesting. I'm not thinking in terms of garments, just of something that might be Cool Fabric. Combining the stainless and bamboo with the cash/silk would be a chance to play with the concept. So I'm doing some thought experiments. How 1" stripes of steel alternating with cash/silk in the warp, similar but alternating with bamboo in the weft would work, as opposed to perhaps alternating steel with the other yarns to create something that wouldn't hold the creases quite so strongly as if the steel alone were used. I need to check the yardage of bamboo and of steel, as that will probably determine how I use it.

The third is perhaps a result of my background, and might not work for you. For a long, long time, as I look at something I am thinking about how I could render it in paint or ink. How could I convert that landscape to watercolour, that bone to pen & ink. Something seen in full colour, 3-dimensional, in my head becomes flat, the 3-dimensionality a matter of selecting the right colours to invoke dimension in the brain of the viewer. I was intrigued to discover that now my brain is starting to convert things to woven fabric.

I drive past this hill on the way back from the gym. The soil is paler than that, in parts almost natural cotton-colour; in my hand the chalk in it almost feels like cotton, or more like cotton than wool! Can I design a fabric that would be that landscape to me? Maybe a textured cotton weave, warp-dominant, or with some other patterning that emphasises one direction over the other. Should there be stripes of darker colour as lines of the plough? How could I bring the sky in? Stripes of sky blue?

Semi-regular organic patterning such as this hedge make me think of twills. A warp of browns, pale and very dark, with green noils for the budding leaves. Weft could be as striped as the view, or I could choose just one of those colours... I like the chalky soil best.

Here's another:

Twill diamonds will refer to the leaves, framed by sky-blue silk (thank you, Diane!). I have the wools and silk noils to blend for the leaf yarn, but have yet to decide how to pattern it; a scarf or stole could be a gradient from dark green to flame-red and yellow. A piece of fabric could include the colours as distinct stripes, or as random patches/flashes in an overall darker green. Lots to think about.


So basically there's a big chunk of my brain that still wants or needs to paint, and is happy to use woven fabric to show others the world as I see it.