Then I took a look at Google Analytics, which I set up around the same time I migrated my website.  To my surprise, in just 11 months, I’ve had 34,485 visitors from 164 countries, and served up over 134,707 pages.  At this rate, I should have nearly 150,000 “hits” this year!  That was a huge surprise.

Anyway, I did some fiddling and added the NeoCounter widget that Sandra Rude has on her blog, so now you, too, can see where people are coming from.

Creatively speaking, I’ve been booked in the evenings, so not much has happened except a little bit of fiddling with the peacock-feather draft.  I lengthened the end of the feather so there’s not as much overlap, and I think it looks much nicer now:

peacock feather design, old version

peacock feather design, new version

In the old version there was a blobby bit, a solid green area that ran between the feathers and obscured the feathery bits at the top of each feather.  So I lengthened the shaft of the feather and made it narrower, to the point where the shaft blended neatly with the top of the next feather.

Today I plan to test-weave the revised version of the feather pattern.  Saturday the actual threads I’m using should arrive, and then I’ll do one more test-weave (to see if I like the colors), and then launch into the actual shawl.

3rd attempt at dyeing a color wheel using Lanaset dyes

I am still finding it difficult to assess near-matches because of the glossiness of the silk and the way the hue-value-chroma changes (often radically) depending on the angle of the light.  I am trying to do the matching at approximately the same time of day (7:30am or so) in the same place, viewing a flat horizontal surface from above.  But it is still difficult.  I look at the photo above – green does not look like a match at all because the light is coming from a slightly oblique angle, but viewed from straight above it matches perfectly.  And so on.

I also decided to remove the color chips and place them on the card.  The edge of the card has shadows that make assessing the match more difficult.

Here are my notes from the comparison (click to get the larger image so you can actually read it!)

notes from 3rd attempt at color wheel

The last assignment is to pick a color, any color, and try to reproduce it.  I will pick a (relatively) neutral color since that is more challenging, and I want to do the hard stuff within the context of the study group while I can still get the thoughts of Karren and the other study group members.  (And, you learn more by diving into the hard stuff first!)

Regarding my taquete puzzle, I did what I should have done at the beginning and called Sharon, my sewing mentor, to ask her about lining a shawl.  It turns out it’s quite do-able – all you have to do is do an invisible, loosely-sewn tack about once every 10-12″ within the shawl, to keep the layers together.  So it’s full steam ahead!  I have purchased several thousand yards of rayon embroidery thread to do the weaving, and it won’t be here for several days, so I’m going to use the interim time to (a) further refine the peacock feather pattern, and (b) maybe weave up some butterflies.  For some reason, I really like the idea of weaving butterflies!

handwoven peacock feathers, round 2

Contrast this with Round 1:

handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete

The new version looks much better, more feathery and less blobby.

Lillian (thanks Lillian!) made an excellent point when she said that the back side would not be the reverse of the front side, hence (possibly) not suitable for a shawl.  (I am pretty sure the drape will be OK, as the four-weft taquete came out very fluid.)  I’m still turning over various possibilities for lining the shawl – the main problem being how to attach the two fabrics together without losing the drape or spending 40 hours catchstitching them together – but it seems unlikely to succeed, at least for now.

(Those of you jumping up and down, waving your hands excitedly, and saying, “Stitched double weave!” are quite correct – that would give me one layer of plainweave to hide the bottom layer of the taquete, and I could then decorate the plainweave, if desired, using surface design techniques.  The only small problem is that I’d have to resley at double the sett, since it is a doubleweave, which in turn means re-beaming, re-threading, re-sleying, oh, heck, just do a different warp.  (Not to mention, six shuttles!)  So, I may try this at some point, but not on this warp.)

This leaves me the interesting question of what to do with the fabric.  The pattern is really too assertive (and too large) to use in clothing, and taquete is too delicate to use in something like cushions.  A wall hanging it’s not.  So it’s hard to think of what to do with the fabric, except decorative stuff like Christmas cards, and I’m not sure where peacock feathers fit into Christmas cards.  I feel like I’m all dressed up with no place to go!

While I’m pondering this quandary, I received a cross-stitch sampler book in the mail yesterday.  Someone (I’m afraid I don’t remember who) suggested to me that cross-stitch samplers are a great place to get design motifs, because the individual components of the sampler are so small.  Indeed ’tis so, so I will probably weave up some butterflies (suitably adapted for taquete) and other small figures over the next few days as I contemplate what to do with my taquete fabric.

Meanwhile, I have just finished dyeing another set of samples, so look for Color Wheel #3 sometime soon…

So I looked at a bunch of peacock feather images, took one, resized it, indexed the color, and then did a LOT of editing in Photoshop to produce this result:

Photoshop simulation of peacock feather design

It has seven shades: black, dark green (green + black), light green, bronze, turquoise, purple, and dark purple (purple + black).  As much as I wanted a four-shuttle weave, I just couldn’t reduce to four weft colors without losing something important.  So this is a five shuttle weave.

Then I did the extensive manipulations necessary to produce a weavable file, producing this drawdown:

peacock feather drawdown

And then, of course, I wove it up:

handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete

I like it, tentatively, though I will probably modify the design to eliminate the dark green.  There is very little visible difference between the dark green and the light green (I should have remembered this), so my intended feathery effect turned into a green blob.  I will instead make the black go further into the green sections, producing the desired feathery effect.

Is this not a miracle of modern software?  From idea to simulation to drawdown to woven fabric, all in just one day.

As a five-shuttle weave, it is quite slow.  So far it is coming out at 90 ppi, and about 4.8 seconds/pick, so it looks like I can weave just about 8″ per hour.  Again, time-consuming but not insurmountable – that’s 10 hours of weaving to do an 80″ shawl, about a week of work.

Next up: experiment with some variations.  I want to simulate it with thin purple stripes lengthwise between the feathers, and change the design so the feather edges are “feathered” with black rather than green/black.  I also want to experiment with using a strand of glitter either in the blue or  the purple, though I think that is probably gilding the lily.

If I like the results from that, it will be time to weave up the shawl!

At any rate, here is my “color wheel”, minus the RP card, which I didn’t have time to wind.  I am still tweaking the colors on most of these:

Color wheel, dyed using Lanaset dyes

The red is a little too blue, the orange definitely too yellow.  Yellow has too high chroma and needs to be toned down, probably by adding black.  Yellow-green is problematic: it is ALMOST a match, the hue (color) and value (lightness/darkness) are correct but it has slightly too low chroma (saturation).  This is difficult to fix, but I think I might be able to manage it.

Green is too yellow – more turquoise is needed.  Blue-green and “blue” (what you are probably seeing as turquoise) are spot on.  The royal blue chip is almost correct, but the chroma is too high (the color is too “bright”); next time I’ll add some black to tone it down.  The violet is way off; it needs more red, but I don’t think I can get it correct with the dyes I used, so I’m going to try a different combination of dyes.

It is amazing how subtle the color differences can be, and how challenging they are to “fix”!  I have been keeping notes on each batch, with comments about the direction in which I’m trying to nudge the colors.  I think it will take me at least another 2-3 batches of skeins before I get things right.

After that, of course, it’s on to the Cibacron F color wheel…

Next (and final) exercise after that is picking a specific color to reproduce.  I will probably pick a neutral color (beiges and browns), as Karren says they are the hardest to reproduce.  I figure I might as well try the most challenging color possible during the study group – that way I can get help on it if I need it, which won’t be the case afterwards.

I am very pleased with what I am learning in this study group, it’s taught me huge amounts about dyes and dyeing.  If Karren ever offers this class commercially, it will be well worth taking.