Forget drawing a blank. Why would you want to do that? I’m busy knitting them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m planning to make Seasons of Creativity using knitted blanks to create color changes in the weft. So one of the things I need to do is sample weft yarns to make sure they’re suitable for use in knitted blanks. Not all yarns will work in knitted blanks – some stick together and refuse to unravel, some unravel too fast and turn into a tangled mess.

I also need to sample weft yarns generally, to see which yarns I like and which I don’t.

And, of course, I need to sample colors to see what colors are suitable for the project.

In fact, there is a ton of sampling that needs to be done for Seasons of Creativity, and left to my own devices I would happily spend the next 2-3 months methodically sampling all the color combinations needed to make sure that the piece comes out perfect.

Alas, the deadline for Convergence entry is February 5. For those who aren’t good with calendars, that is exactly 38 days from now.

Since I was a project manager for twenty years, which is to say that I hate schedule drama (schedule drama is the arch-nemesis of every project manager), I’m calculating backwards from the entry date. 5 days of extra time for rework should something go wrong. 10 days of weaving time (it’s 15,000 picks!), especially considering that launching a class around the end of January. 2 days for mending, wet-finishing and prepping for photography, retouching photos, etc. That leaves 21 days for all the sampling, ordering any additional yarns, knitting and dyeing the blanks, etc. Three weeks sounds like a lot of time, but considering I’m working full time AND need to have a second piece ready for Complexity a month later, that’s pedal-to-the-metal speed.

So I will have to be far more efficient about sampling than usual, and do less sampling than I’m generally comfortable with. This will be interesting!

Anyway, I still have a week of vacation left, so I’m going to make the most of it. I’ve already decided to use mercerized cotton or a mix of mercerized cotton and silk for the leaf motifs in Seasons of Creativity, so that’s easy – I knitted up a blank or two yesterday and will do a few more this morning so I can test colors.

However, for the stars and butterflies, things are a bit more complicated. I am planning to use a combination of weft yarns for this section of Seasons of Creativity, but I’m not sure which yarns I want to use yet. Here are the yarns I’m thinking of using:

On the left is a gorgeous, very fine reeled silk yarn that I bought on eBay about ten years ago. Second from the left is a beautiful ultrafine silk yarn with a metallic silver thread twisted in – it was originally intended for weaving obi. I bought it from John Marshall a few years at a show. The photo really doesn’t do it justice – glitter doesn’t show up well in photos.

Third from the left is a sparkle yarn from Giovanna Imperia Designs. Again, the photo doesn’t do it justice. And on the far right are some iridescent yarns, again from Giovanna Imperia Designs.

All of these are very fine yarns, 20,000 yards per pound or so. So my plan is to use three strands as weft. I’ve knitted seventeen blanks in various combinations of the threads, with waste yarn in between the blanks. Here are a few of them. (Pardon my messy desk!)

And here’s what a single blank looks like:

You may be wondering about the single row of larger stitches midway through the blank. It’s a marker row. I put in a row of larger stitches every 50 stitches when I’m knitting a blank. In the bigger blank I will put in a bigger set of marker rows every 500 rows. It lets me tell where I am in the blank – so I can put in color changes accurately when I’m dyeing. That’s because knitted blanks are unpredictably stretchy, especially when wet, and they’re also very long. If I didn’t put in the marker, I’d have a 30-foot snake of wet knitting that started out 19 feet long and where on earth do I put the color changes? With the marker rows, I can simply count along the marker rows and know exactly where to put the color changes.

Now that I have the blanks, my next step will be figuring out how to use them. (Yeah, I know that’s backwards.) Today’s plan is to create a test file to see how butterflies, stars, and leaves weave up in each of the weft combinations, and also to figure out how best to sample the colors. It’s quite possible that the only way to sample the color combinations efficiently is, well, to weave the final product. The control freak in me is not happy about this, but perhaps I simply need to learn how to let go and “wing it” for a change!

Once I’ve figured out how to use the blanks, I’ll need to dye them. So today will also be a dye day. Tomorrow I’ll rinse and dry the blanks, and Wednesday I’ll (hopefully) start weaving my samples!

Now that I’m home again, I’ve restarted work on Seasons of Creativity. I was thinking about it on my trip, but trying doing complex Photoshop work with a mouse on a 13″ laptop screen, when you’re used to working with a pen on a 22″ tablet-monitor, is like trying to move a giant pile of sand with tweezers. After about five minutes I gave up.

Here’s the sketch for “Seasons of Creativity” now:

(Apologies for the disappearing leaves – on my tablet-monitor the darker leaves show up clearly, on the other monitor they are so dark they nearly disappear against the black. Yet both monitors were color-calibrated using professional equipment. So I have no idea how they will appear on your monitor. Go figure.)

I like this sketch a lot better. Conceptually, the idea is that the leaves are falling down, decaying, and reappearing as sparks of new ideas, which evolve into butterflies of new work that then fly off in new directions. The previous sketch had transformed the leaves directly into butterflies, which seemed to leave out the critical step of genesis. There was ripening and harvest, then decay, but the immediate appearance of butterflies seemed to suggest the immediate springing forth of new work, and it just doesn’t happen that way.

Here’s the initial sketch, to jog your memory:

The new sketch is a lot cleaner visually, and works better conceptually. Though I like the colors better in the old sketch – I think I may lighten the colors a bit in the new sketch, and replace the dark blue with spring green and pastel purple/light blue.

Which gets me to colors. Experienced weavers will no doubt be looking at “Seasons of Creativity” and saying WTF? How on earth are you going to get that many colors into a single piece without using a bazillion wefts? Especially with a solid black warp on the loom?

Short answer: painted wefts.

I’m planning to use four wefts for this piece (for non-weavers: weft threads are the ones that run cross-wise across the fabric). The piece is woven “sideways” – the warp runs from left to right in the image, so the weft appears to run top to bottom. (This is accomplished by taking the finished cloth and turning it sideways. 🙂 )

One weft will be black, for the background. The other four will be dyed in different stripes of changing colors. Different leaves and butterflies will be woven with different wefts, allowing me a wide variety of colors with a limited number of wefts. Voila! Magic.

Let me show you how this works. Here’s the pattern of colors for weft #1. If you were to see only the weft down the length of the piece, here’s what you’d see:

And here are the leaves that are woven with weft #1 on top. All other wefts are hiding on the bottom of the fabric when these leaves/butterflies are being woven:

(Technically this is showing the black background, which is weft #4, as well as the brightly colored weft #1, but it’s much easier to see the motifs against the black background, so I left it in.)

Here is the color pattern for weft #2:

And here are its leaves/butterflies:

Here’s weft #3:

And its leaves/butterflies:

Put them all together and you get the original sketch:

Now, you might wonder how I plan to get all those color changes, and especially how I plan to get those nice blended colors at the boundaries, since dyeing a bazillion skeins of weft yarn takes a lot of time and results in ugly, sharp color changes.

Well, some of you may remember Autumn Splendor, and the knitted blanks I used to create ten excruciatingly accurate matching panels of handwoven fabric for that piece:

The piece looks like the sleeves and front panels (and back panels, and side panels, and facings) were dyed in a single bout. ‘Tain’t so. I simply dyed the weft so the color changes matched up precisely, using knitted blanks.

Knitted blanks are long rectangular pieces of knitted fabric that you dye and then unravel to use as yarn in something else. Knitters commonly use them for making socks. I use them for controlling weft color changes. Here’s one of the (insanely long) knitted blanks for Autumn Splendor:

I figure that all I need to do is create three of those, in precisely defined color intervals, and I’ll be in business.

I’m also thinking of using four different yarns – mercerized cotton for the warp and the leaves, unmercerized cotton for the background, silk for the stars and the butterflies, and iridescent thread carry-alongs for the stars and butterflies, but will have to do some serious sampling there to make sure the proportions and aspect ratios come out right.

I’m really going to have to get cracking on all this, though – the deadline for Convergence entry is February 5, which gives me less than 2 months to get everything done. And the deadline for Complexity is coming up a few weeks after that – I’d like to have a piece in Complexity as well, which really puts me under the gun. No time to lose!!

The last week got eaten up by preparations for my Black Friday sale, but now that that’s almost done, I’m back to work on “Seasons of Creativity”!

I’ve been experimenting with some sketches in Photoshop. I tried some sketches with the leaf motif, starting with this one.

There were a couple concepts behind this sketch. The bottom left represented the dying leaves of autumn, followed by the blue of winter, and then the resurgence of creativity in the spring, leading to a burst of free ideas (represented by the flying leaves and the explosion of non-leafy colors). I was thinking I could also make the leaves three-dimensional, weaving them with a silk/stainless steel weft (or some other stiff weft) in a double weave structure, stitched in a single layer down the center of the leaf stem, and then cutting them free from the backing layer in strategic areas. That would be fun!

I didn’t like the sketch, though. The flying leaves felt too constrained, the brown and blue felt uninteresting, and I didn’t like the progression from bottom left to top right, and…well, lots of “ands”.

I went back to the previous sketch, which I liked a lot better:

Why did I like it better?

I thought about it and decided that I liked the sense of freedom in the leaves in this sketch. In the other sketch, I had eliminated all the overlapping leaves, and shaped the flow of the leaves fairly tightly, sending them upward (which is against the natural downward flow of a falling leaf). The result felt stilted and stiff.

The leaves in this sketch, on the other hand, were floating down freely, playfully, and felt much more open.

But there was no tension in the image, no sense of progress. It needed something to give it tension. What?

Now, my friend Osnat had suggested using butterflies instead of leaves for the original sketch, because butterflies and creativity, right?

I had felt that was too cliched to use.

But…what about leaves falling, dying, transforming into butterflies, and flying off?

I like this idea!

It’s still just a concept sketch, but I think this one has a good bit of meat to it. There are two concepts layered in here. The first is the idea of the natural cycle of birth/death, applied to creativity and creative projects. The completion of a project on the left, followed by a fallow resting phase (possibly with a bit of moping and depression, which usually happens to me for a few weeks between major projects), followed by flights of fancy as a new project takes form.

The second concept is the evolution of ideas. On the left, fairly staid, stable ideas – leaves in autumn, the natural world, things that have been going on for millions of years. Those ideas fall into the mind, compost, cocoon, and emerge as free, fanciful, colorful ideas that flutter off and create new things. (Okay, butterflies are still kind of cliched, but work with me here, OK? 🙂 )

Technically, this could be created with two or three painted wefts. I’m tempted to use a thicker thread that is wrapped with metallic glitter, or to use a carryalong metallic thread, to make the butterflies glimmer.

There is still quite a bit of work to do to arrive at a final sketch, let along a workable, weavable file. Also, I’ll have to drag the knitting machine out of the closet and knit some knitted-blank samples for dyeing…lots to do!