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!

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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.

Scarf in a day

As it has been a bit hot (40C/140F) the past days, I hid in the aircon with my loom watching movies. Wonderful thing about having a rigid heddle loom… you only need a table and your lap anywhere in the house!

I’d actually measured and wound the warp onto the back beam earlier, but something was niggling at the back of my mind… I’d glimpsed a broken thread somewhere… note to self: don’t listen to extremely interesting podcasts while dressing the loom!

Anyway, I unwound and discovered:

My phone wouldn’t focus on the yarn… but you get the idea

The yarn gods were smiling though, because I had one more warp end than I needed so I could just pull this end out.

Despite the broken bit, it is gorgeous wool. I’ve not woven a vari that is a ply of multiple colours and then crossed it with itself. But this was the yarn I sampled last year. I’d thought it’d look good with purple – which it did – but against itself it was stunning.

What fascinates me, is the interplay of the colours… the long change of the variegation gives strong warp strips and these don’t blur or get muddied by a weft that’s going through the same changes.

Here is the scarf, just waiting for a wash, with the stripes still strong:

The colour twist gives it such a lively surface too. Up close it almost looks busy.

I’m looking forward to seeing if it changes at all when fulled!

Weaving colour #4

If you mix red and yellow you get orange and if you mix yellow and blue you get green, right? Most weavers know the answer to this question, because they’ve messed about with paints at some point or watched others do so. Some of you will even have created or used a colour wheel at some stage. If not then this post is for you!

Essentially a colour wheel shows how colour moves gradually from red to blue and blue to yellow and yellow to red with all the gradations in between.

It’s not just an exercise in paint mixing though; the colour wheel has long been used as a ready-reckoner or quick-reference tool for choosing colours that work together.

So should you rush out and buy a colour wheel? Well they are fun to play with if you like colours! But (sadly) they’re probably only of use to people who really struggle with colour.

Okay, so why did I do a post about them? Because they are used to explain key colour concepts that I’ll be talking about in future posts in this series!

Weaving colour #3

So you have bought a lovely blue yarn and you think how great it will look with that other blue yarn in your stash, but when you put them side by side you realise they don’t look good together. Why? A common reason is that one is a warm blue and the other a cool blue.

What does that mean? Well, when colours have more red or yellow in them they tend to be warm and when they have more blue or green in them they tend to be cool. Usually what you’ll notice is that one seems livelier (warm) and one seems duller (cool). The tricky thing is that it can be hard to see until you compare them.

If you don’t feel that you really get this idea, take a trip to your local hardware store or paint store – anywhere that has one of those collections of colour cards/paint chips. Pick a couple of different greys and put them next to each other and do the same for whites. You should be able to see what’s warm and what’s cool easily with whites and greys.

Then grab different yellows, reds, blues and greens and compare. You should see what’s lively/dull or more pink/more blue (more yellow/more green)!

But what happens if you mix warm and cool colours? Usually you end up with a slightly “flat” result where the colours look dull, but you can get “muddy” colours that take on a brown or grey appearance too.

If you’re not sure about a combo of yarns… sample!