Just finished the last of the yardage (38″, not bad for leftover warp) and cut both pieces off the loom.  Here are photos:

Weft-dominant side of the knitted blank shawl

Warp-dominant side of the knitted-blank shawl

I don’t really like this shawl (yet, at least; we’ll see how I feel after wet-finishing it) – there’s simply too much going on.  I think if I were redoing this I would use the knitted blank with a solid color warp and a simple pattern; it creates a lot of pattern all by itself, which clashes with the two other patterns I’ve got going.

On the other hand, it is absolutely gorgeous when rumpled:

Rumpled view of the knitted-blank shawl

The solid-color came out a lot more unified, as Penny predicted:

Weft-dominant side of the yardage for AIDS Lifecycle outfits

Warp-dominant side of the yardage for AIDS Lifecycle outfits

As you can see, I had a problem with a dyelot change (must have grabbed the wrong ball of thread when the bobbin ran out) but I think I can work around that when sewing.

I like this one a lot and, should I do another similarly colored warp, will do a full shawl in it. The pictures don’t really do it justice (though the colors are a lot truer with the new camera).  The iridescence on both pieces is amazing.

Off to work!

The intent was to provide more organic shapes than straight lines.  The first blank, which you may recall looked like this:

This blank looked great in the small sample I’d woven, but after about four inches it was clear it was turning into very small, repetitive stripes, very predictable order:

It’s not a bad pattern, just not what I had been hoping for.  So I dyed the second blank like this:

and here is a photo of roughly what it looks like woven up:

(I know, I know, it’s a rotten picture.  I have got to figure out how to get that SLR camera working, but life is so short and there is so little time…!)

At any rate, bad photography aside, it’s much closer to what I was looking for – the colors are softer and more organic, and the overlapping colors are not as bad as I thought they’d be:

You can see some sections where shots of red are alternating with shots of yellow, and it’s a little disruptive, but because the overall pattern is fairly “busy” to start with, it isn’t super obvious.  Instead it appears as a Monet-like texturing of the color.

I like this approach a lot better – there’s more variation and it’s more interesting.  It’s also something that can only be done using a knitted blank, whereas I realized (after the fact) that the first blank (stripes) was only mimicking what could be done with a handpainted skein if you got the length of the skein right.  Notice how much more organic the color flow is in the second version, whereas it is very regular, almost rigid in the first version!

Not that that is necessarily bad – just not what I wanted for this shawl.  I do plan to weave up another shawl in pattern #1, against a black background, with an undulating twill pattern, and call it “Tiger Stripes”.  I think woven up that way, it will be VERY attractive.

Here is the sample:

Machine knitted blank dyed in vertical stripes

And here is what it looks like woven up:

Knitted blank dyed in vertical stripes, unraveled and woven up

The photo really doesn’t do justice to it, it’s really lovely.  It has exactly the effect I was hoping for: subtle variation in color, with enough pooling (sections of solid color) that there are distinct areas of color.  And, of course, with reds, oranges, and yellows, everything complements the warp nicely.

Here is a photo of the side, where the colors can be seen more clearly:

Selvage side of 2nd knitted blank sample

In the first section (sections are marked off by a shot of blue thread) I used a balanced weave (equal amounts of warp and weft showing).  In the next two sections I switched the tie-up to a slightly weft-dominant top side, which I think showed off the colors nicely.  (On the opposite side, of course, you would see mostly warp, which would show off the fuchsia-to-turquoise progression.  Nothing wrong with that!)

In the third section I decided to see what happened if I used the full width.  Turns out it works marvelously; I got great pooling of the yellows.  So this is how I will weave the finished shawl.

I really really like these color effects and will use the same technique in the finished shawl.

So, now that I know what I’m going to do…it’s time to start dyeing!  With luck I can get this woven up this week, freeing up the loom for the cashmere coat.

It turned out to be every bit as fussy as I had imagined, and in the end I couldn’t get it to work with any precision.  However, I think the method could be used for interesting color effects – just not anything with the precision of weft ikat.

Since even a “failed” experiment tells us something, here are the photos of the process and some of my thoughts on it, post-mortem.

Painting the knitted blank.

(Mike was kind enough to shoot this photo for me with my new-to-me digital SLR, which I plan to use for taking better photos of my shawls.  But that’s another blog post…)

And here is how the blank looks woven up (I did not weave the blue and green sections):

Photo showing most of the finished sample

Since it is difficult to pick out detail, here is a photo showing some of the effects.  The red oval is circling what was the yellow oval against a black background in the painted sample:

The section circled in red is the yellow oval in the original sample.

Note how dramatically the oval is shortened and widened!  I had predicted something of this effect based on the properties of the knitted blank, which is both narrower than each weft shot (1/4 the width) and about 2.5 times longer than it will be woven up.  Thus, anything painted on the blank will show up four times wider and about 1/3 the length that it appears on the blank.

I was pleased at having predicted this correctly, but still somewhat visually astonished by the degree of change.

I rapidly discovered that I had the width wrong, so the colors weren’t lining up correctly.  I messed around with the number of warp ends somewhat, which you can see in this selvage photo:

The selvages of the knitted-blank experiment.

Finally, I didn’t like the pooling effects near the edges.  As the weft shots got further and further misaligned, there were sections where things got pretty clearly muddled:

The rectangle shows where things are lined up (bottom of rectangle) and towards the top, where they are not.

You can see where at the bottom of the rectangle, the threads are relatively well aligned. Towards the top, you get striping every other row where things got muddled.  The effect was particularly pronounced near the edges.

My conclusion from all of this is that precision painted effects are going to be very difficult if not impossible, because it’s very hard to get the width precisely right.  (My hat goes off to those mudmee weavers in Thailand who can do weft ikat.  Dang, they must be good!)  Even if it were possible, the drastic change in aspect ratio between the blank and the painted piece would make getting a real “image” difficult.  So the original idea won’t work.

However, that does not mean that interesting effects are not possible!  I am thinking that for this next shawl, I will dye the blank with two vertical stripes, one red-orange, one gold.  This should (in theory) result in three distinct areas:

• places where the red-orange pools, making it mostly orange
• places where the gold pools
• places where the red-orange and the gold alternate.

I’m betting that the end result will be drifts and diagonal stripes of color, which will produce nice color effects.  Because the colors are so closely related, they should blend gracefully, producing a nice mixed effect with not too much muddying.  (The black and the orange in the sample, on the other hand, are clearly muddying each other.)  Because the stripes are so large, there should be considerable sections of both red and gold – it won’t diffuse into mud.

That’s the idea, anyway.  Tomorrow I will try dyeing another small sample.

I will also replace the simple rosepath design with a somewhat more complex design, not as complex as the ones I was using before, but with an undulating line.  Might be too complicated but I really won’t know until I weave it.

This is really really cool!  I can hardly wait to play with it more tomorrow.