Sunday, March 17, 2013

Right brain, left brain

I think you might say that I'm coming more into balance these days. Now that my kids have all gone away to college, my left brain is catching up to my right brain and I am spending more time on my family history research (see my other blog: Voices From A Distant Past).

But the right brain still demands its time as well, and here's what I've been up to:

I finished this scarf for my husband, using my own hand-dyed yarns.


Here's a close-up... the colors aren't quite this brown in reality:

After that, I wanted to weave an ikat pattern.  I found surprisingly few examples on the web, so I had to figure it out by myself.  First I measured the warp and dyed it chartreuse, one of my favorite colors.

Next I wrapped sections of about 20 threads in what I hoped would end up as a single organic shape, and overdyed them in cerulean blue (to get a nice chartreuse to green gradation.)

This is a selection of various weights of cotton yarns and fabrics from my dyeing session:

Here's the warp after I untied all the wraps.

And here it is, on the loom and ready to weave.

This is the finished piece.  Hmmmm. I'm not altogether pleased, but I have a better idea of what I should do next time.  I think I should use thickened dyes and paint the colors on rather than wrapping the sections of warp.  I think this would give me the organic shape I was going for.  I ended up with more of a striped effect, because each group of twenty warps had the same wrap.  If I painted the individual threads, the change from one color to the other would have been more gradual.  Oh well, live and learn!