My mind is in a complete whirl - partly the Margo Selby class, partly the appalling weather, partly the trip to Nova Scotia, partly the blast of weavy stimuli from the NEWS shows and my classmates.
So, I'll begin at the end. Today, I finished weaving off the last bit of warp from the Margo Selby class, in a 2/6 random-walk twill. I used up the rest of the Noro Sekku (cotton/wool/nylon/silk) - well, I used all but the the brilliant lime green and pale, intense pink, which dominated the warp too much. Once I ran out of that, I used a hand-painted wool/nylon, skinny sock yarn from Woolbearers in New Jersey, simply because the colors appealed to me. And it's done. I forgot to photograph it before I washed it, so these are wet photos. First, the front of the Sekku weft....
And the back....
The front of the Woolbearers weft...
And the back....
I don't like the back of either of these wefts, because the wefts overwhelm the warps. I like the fronts much better, but neither is getting me where I want to go, which is to somehow meld and interlace the colors of warp and weft in complex ways, disguising the weave structure along the way. I don't know how to do that just yet - double ikat in plainweave?
As for the class itself, here are reminders of what I wove. Day 1, which was supposed to be playing with a wide variety of different wefts and weave structures:
And Day 2, which was supposed to be an elaboration on one or two ideas from Day1:
Margo did not give us instructions of what kind of warp to bring; she just said bring a loom with a warp on it and as many different kinds of yarns as we could manage. On Day 1, I really liked these changes in weft color, which were made by swapping out and alternating different colors of yarn.
I also liked the hand-manipulated, long-float structure I invented, because it was easy on an eight-shaft table loom.
So on Day 2, I combined the two, using a Noro yarn for the skinny weft (easy color changes!) and two worsted-weight knitting yarns for the float weave.
I picked the colors of the heavy yarns to reflect what was happening in the Noro weft at that point.
I think this worked in interesting ways, with the colors and the textures talking to each other. However, instead of continuing this thought, I went off into another weave structure Margo recommended and kept using the first two heavy yarns for most of the float weave parts. You can see the results in the photo above of what I finished on Day 2 - not terribly successful, to my mind. That doesn't mean it wasn't a successful exercise, of course; it was a very successful exercise because my brain is still whirling, but not surprisingly, I didn't hit upon The One Perfect Fabric right off.
So, where do I go from here? Good question. I need to finish off the wool band for the Turkish Coat, because that's on the Purrington floor loom. After that, I'm free - and that's scary. Or exhilarating. Or both. I suppose I'd like to get the 8-shaft Norwood floor loom up and running, but that's just doing, not creating. I suppose what I'd like to do next is figure out how to get the colors in warp and weft to be co-dominant, and yet change in ways unrelated, at least directly, to the straight lines of the warp and weft yarns.
Did I mention my brain hurts?
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