Details

So what I posted yesterday was a sample from the beginning of an 8-yard warp.  Or, at least, the part of the warp I painted last summer with Sara was 8 yards long when I measured it out before painting.  I padded this painted warp bout out to around 6.5 inches wide with stripes of Harrisville Highland Blackberry and Aubergine, and planned to weave this off as warp-faced plainweave with Aubergine Highland Shetland, about half the grist of the Shetland.

I wanted to sample weaving occasional weft-faced, weft-float stripes, in kente-ish fashion, so I set up the loom using the draft from Suzanne Halvorson's Handwoven article, Kente-Inspired Scarf, in the March/April 2013 issue.  Here, the contrast weft floats over three ends at a time, which worked well in my sample, I thought.  From the bottom up, the three weft-float samples were gold and purple Paternayan needlepoint wool (all three strands together), a thin red rayon mill end, and a pukey flesh-pink silk singles, Fiesta's La Luz (oh, look, they called the colorway Champagne; I'm never drinking anything that color).

The texture of the Paternayan wasn't different enough from the ground warp to stand out as much as I wanted.  Also, the bright gold was too bright and too monotone; if I went with this yarn, I'd overdye and tone down this color (and every other bright/light color I would have used of this yarn, as I was thinking of using many different colors, depending on what the painted warp was doing at a particular point).  This sample weft also made clear to me that while going from selvedge was interesting, it might be cool to have these weft floats go only partway across the warp, or cover only part of the middle of the warp.

The red rayon was much better, but I quickly wanted a thicker yarn.  A quick toss of one bin turned up two skeins of the silk La Luz.  This texture I like a great deal; the color not so much (did I mention puke?) and again I think I'd prefer a less solid color, although the little dark warp-wise shadows help this yarn out more than they did for the wool.

Here's the sample after washing:

The differential shrinkage between the ground warp and the weft floats is tolerable, but note at the top of the photo how the solid Harrisville Highland stripes shrunk lengthwise more than the painted warp bout.  That's because the painted warp yarn had been washed, but the Harrisville hadn't.  When I wound on this striped warp, there was about a foot too much of the Harrisville at the end, even though I'd measured off 8 yards.  I don't know if this will be a pain in the final finished fabric; we'll see.