The weaving itch

It’s been a while since my rigid heddle loom has been dressed and I gotta say there’s an itch growing.

Unfortunately I’ve been a laggard about painting my walls, so the craft room is still drop-sheet land. I do have my test patch done though and I think it’s going to look a-maze-ing!

When the woman at the paint shop popped the lid for the mandatory inspection, the two other customers at the counter made various exclamations about the… um… intensity of the colour. One bloke commented that you wouldn’t want to wake up to it with a hangover! Good thing I don’t sleep in the craft room, ey?

I like my walls to have visual interest.

As evidenced by the metallic, coffee paint I used in my guest bedroom. No one quite got it until they saw the end result. I’m thinking that’ll be the case for this room too, because everyone seems terrified of the fuchsia.

Anyways, I’ll be weaving again before xmas… hopefully.

Olive green and kind of plaid

So this is fresh off the loom! An olive green scarf with grey and blue stripes so it has a bit of plaid action going on. I like it.

The blue is actually more subtle in real life than in this pic, but I’ve had a cold and it was too much energy to mess around with the camera! The image gives most of the idea.

One aspect of this scarf that I’m very pleased with, is that I deliberately avoided symmetry by changing up the colour order for each stripe and I not spacing the stripes across the width too evenly.  The result works well.

I think I can say the first “not my colours” scarf is successful!

Colours not my own

This week on the loom I am trying to weave a scarf in colours that I am never drawn to and never work with or wear. It’s been a challenge!

I’ve tried with my weaving not to spend all my time in the colours I’m most comfortable with. Tried and thought I’d done well. Then I found myself looking at some muted “winter” coloured yarn and realised I’d never gone far enough outside my colour comfort zone. These were colours I’d never even think to buy!

So I bought one – a dark olive green – and I’m adding a little blue and grey as stripes.

The funny part is that normally I have a great sense of how colours will go together. Not this time! I stared at the colours and twisted the yarn this way and that for ages before feeling confident it’d work.

Now it’s on the loom it seems to be going fine and I’m liking the subtlety. Pictures will follow once I’ve woven more!

Can yarn be cursed?

Some time ago I did a post on the “bendy scarf”. It was not the yarn’s fault the scarf had failed – totally knitter’s error – but I’m beginning to suspect this yarn has been cursed by an evil yarn fairy.

Why? I just finished it weaving it and… somehow my yarn calculations went screwy. Sigh. Now the result of this wasn’t fatal and the scarf was only for me. Still…

So what happened? Well, I’d always wanted to do a striped scarf with this cotton, so I warped with lovely stripes:

Here is the purple yarn as weft, crossing the stripes

The warp only took half the yarn I had left, so I decided I’d use the cotton for weft as well. Because I didn’t have enough of any one colour to do the whole thing, I contemplated a plaid, but I’m not a huge plaid fan. Finally I decided on blocks (roughly 3rds) of each colour.

The different weft colours are so subtle which I love.

If you look closely you’ll see green weft at the front, blue in the middle and purple at the back

But 3rds did not happen! I’d already transitioned from the 1st colour to the 2nd when I realised I had gone wrong… which means I was too far in to start over.

What I do love about this project though, is it’s a great experiment in colour. Not only are the colours much duller than most yarns I use but they are so close in value that the weft really does blend beautifully.

I also got to play with gradually transitioning the colours. Sadly this was also a casualty of my messed up calculations, so I’m not in love with how they came out, but the upside is that I’ve now tried the technique and know what not to do!

And where did my calc’s go wrong? No idea. I suspect I flipped some numbers around when I weighed the yarn originally… Ah well. I still have a new stripey scarf!

Weaving colour #7

So in the previous posts about this I talked about using different shades of one colour or choosing a complementary pair, but you might have a yarn stash that doesn’t provide those options, or you might just like lots of colours in your cloth! What to do?

Say you want three colours. There is something generally pleasing about three colours I think (maybe that’s just me) and you have two easy options here:

•   triadic colours
•   analogous colours

Sorry what? Yeah those colour terms get a bit weird.

Simply put, if you take any three colours from the colour wheel that are equal distances apart then that’s your triad. The most basic of this is, of course, red, yellow and blue. The trick is that they must all three must be equally far apart, like spokes.

If, instead, you take three colours that lie next to each other on the wheel (e.g. green, blue-green and green-blue) then those are your analogous colours and will also work well together.

With both triadic and analogous colours you should use more of one colour and then the others in small amounts. You might remember that was mentioned too with complimentary colours.

Weaving colour #6

This post is about complimentary colours and the name kind of gives it away… they complement each other! But which colours are complementary? Take a look at a colour wheel and draw a straight line from one edge, through the centre to the other edge and it’ll run through two colours. This pair sitting opposite each other on the wheel and are complementary.

So if you have a lovely orange-red yarn, what is opposite orange-red on the wheel? Green-blue.

The trick with using complementary colours is that just because they go together doesn’t mean you should do a 50/50 split between the two. In fact complementary colours work best if you use more of one and just a little of the other.

For example, if you’re designing stripes you might want to do thick stripes in one and thinner or fewer stripes in the other. But sometimes the yarn companies do the work for you, like where you have a yarn with a colour fleck in it, those are often complimentary to the base colour of the ply.

I like complimentary colours, because the right mixture of them always feels lively to me!

Weaving colour #5

As I’ve said before, colour matters to weavers because when we cross a warp with a weft we visually mix colours. We also like to do things like create stripes and blocks of colour in patterns.

So how do you know that two, three or even four colours will work together? You use a ‘colour scheme’ a bit like those helpful paint brochures that show wall, ceiling and trim colours that work together give a colour scheme! Except you can take yours from the trusty colour wheel.

If you look at any colour wheel (see below) it shows the progression of colours around the wheel, but most of them also show the palest version of the colour in the centre and the darkest on the outer edge. If you look at just one wedge of colour – for example blue – then you’ll see a colour scheme that runs from blue-tinged white through to a dark navy.

That is a monochromatic (one-colour) colour scheme because they’re all the same blue just with more white/black added in to make them lighter/darker.

Of course we’re talking yarn not paint, so sure you might have four balls of yarn that are all blue, but are they shades of the same blue?

If you lay them side-by-side, in order from dark to light, you should see in daylight (beware the distorting power of electric lights!) that they’re shades of the same colour. Though this is where, if you really struggle with colour, you could grab a colour wheel and place the yarns over it to get help recognising if they’re the same blue because they should all belong to the same wedge of the wheel.

The great thing with monochromatic colours is that you can use as many or as few of them as you want (and can find in yarn). Just keep in mind what I’ve said before about the effects of the brightness of colours if you’re planning a pattern so that you draw the eye to part of the pattern you want.