This was a variation on the Ocean Sunset shawl, except that I made it with a knitted blank!

Knitted blanks are an interesting concept taught to me by Nancy Roberts of Machine Knitting to Dye For.  You knit up a rectangular piece of fabric, dye it, and then unravel it and reuse the yarn.  Using this technique you can get gradual color changes WITHOUT having  to dye a zillion skeins, and you can get other effects as well (see the “Crazy Colors” shawl for an example).  In this case, I dyed a single blank a gradual change from yellow to red and back again to see what would happen when I wove it up!

I am of mixed minds about this shawl.  I don’t like the boldness of the lines near the bottom of the shawl, but I like the idea of the gradual color change.  I think I may try this idea again, but with a simpler pattern.

[Show as slideshow]

The pattern for Ocean Sunset II.

The warp on the loom. Doesn't it look pretty?

This is the knitted blank. Notice how it shades gradually from gold to red.

It's hard to see in the photo, but the bobbins gradually change color from start to finish. Beautiful!

The completed shawl before wet-finishing.

This shawl, which is one of my favorites, is woven on a 2/28 nm silk warp dyed in 29 colors, with a black cashmere yarn of about the same weight as weft.  The colors are so close to each other that visually they are almost indistinguishable, producing a very nice gradual fade from turquoise to fuchsia and back again.

This kind of gradual color change has been so successful that I am embarking on a new adventure: dyeing a full color wheel in 60/2 silk, in gradually changing colors!  I estimate that it will take about 120 skeins to get all the way around the color wheel, but fortunately I have enough 60/2 silk on hand that I can do it.  Then I can REALLY play!

[Show as slideshow]

A black-and-white rendition of the pattern for Black Jewel

An in-progress photo. I love the way the colors look in the warp!

Closeup of the center part of the shawl. (Courtesy Joe Decker, Rockslide Photography.)

"Black Jewel", full view

Another photo of the finished shawl. (Courtesy Joe Decker, Rockslide Photography.)

This came off the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the garnet shawl. I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep shade of eggplant.

The draft was my first attempt at network drafting, for which I had lots of generous help from Bonnie Inouye. Network drafting is a technique for making curved patterns in fabric, made available to the handweaving community by Alice Schlein in her book Network Drafting: An Introduction. It produces complex, curvy patterns with very little effort, and generally produces a very stable cloth.

Weaving the fabric for the jacket was quite a challenge; one of my shafts kept “floating” and so there were numerous flaws in the finished fabric.  But aha, the magic of cutting and sewing: I simply cut around the flaws!  There are a few visible in the finished piece, but on the whole it looks quite nice, better than the fabric did!

I lined the jacket with silk charmeuse, dyed chestnut brown to match the warp.  The pattern is a Butterick pattern, but I don’t recall the pattern number.

[Show as slideshow]

This is a partial view of the jacket pattern, which had a very long repeat (so not all shown here).

A close-up of the finished fabric. I wove it in chestnut and golden brown silk warp with an eggplant-colored cashmere weft.

A photo of the finished cloth.

And, the finished jacket, modeled by yours truly.

This shawl came out of the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the silk and cashmere jacket.  I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm silk/cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep garnet red.

The inspiration for this color came from a dear friend of mine, who is a Tibetan lama (very unusual for a Caucasian woman) and who had moved to India with her family.  I had offered her some mohair yarn in whatever shade she liked; she asked for a maroon or dark red, as that is the most appropriate shade for a Tibetan lama to wear.

So I mucked about in my dye samples, and finally decided to dye it using mostly red dye, with just a trace of turquoise to tone down the color.

I was absolutely shocked by the resulting shade: a glorious auburn red!  I hated to part with such beautiful yarn, but I had promised it, so I sent it on its way and promptly determined to dye some more!

This was one of my early attempts at network drafting, a very regular pattern resembling the overshot pattern called “orange peel”.  I still like the symmetry.

I beaded it with small amber beads and large garnet foil beads, but I have to warn you: those beads come off!  I’m constantly having to sew them back on.   Next time I use smaller beads!

[Show as slideshow]

Another shot of the garnet weft placed against the warp.

This is the garnet shawl in its preliminary stages, showing the beads

Half-woven garnet shawl. Here the pattern shows most clearly!

Larger photo of the garnet shawl

My garnet shawl, beaded.

This came off the same warp as the silk/cashmere jacket and the garnet shawl, and shares the same draft as the garnet shawl.  (I liked the pattern so much I wove a second one!)

Weaving this was a real challenge – for some reason, one of the shafts in my loom was floating, so there are many irregularities in the cloth.  For this reason, I didn’t show it at CNCH (my regional weaving conference), but I still think it’s pretty.

[Show as slideshow]

Computer simulation of the pattern, generated by weaving software.

The dyed cashmere/silk weft yarn, shown against the silk warp yarns.

The shawl on the loom.

A photo of the shawl before wet-finishing.