By weaving like a maniac, I finished weaving up the second sample tonight, and like it much better.  Here they are side by side:

The right-hand one, with lined-up color changes, has a stiff, stilted feel that (to me, anyway) clashes with the organic flow of the color.  The left-hand one, with a semirandom arrangement of stripes, is much more pleasing to the eye.  Well, my eye, anyway.

The difference in chroma between the left and right samples is not a trick of the light, by the way.  You may recall that I painted part of the warp with “dark” colors (4 tsp dye per cup of water) and the other half with a “medium” shade (2 tsp dye per cup of water).  The left-hand side is the medium shade, the right-hand side the dark shade.  I like the intensity of the dark shades much, much better and plan to use them in the final project.

I have also tested wool and silk wefts.  Tentatively I like the silk weft better, because it has better gloss, feels nicer, and drapes beautifully – but I need to talk to Sharon and get her opinion on what will go best with the pattern.

Off to bed!  Tomorrow morning I need to start prepping samples for my guild program on Thursday (I’m the featured speaker).  I’ll be talking about “The Creative Process” – the first half of my presentation is about the fears that stop people from creating, the second half is about the actual process of creation, generously illustrated with examples from the wedding-dress.  I’ll also be bringing LOTS of samples from my other woven pieces to show my creative process.

So if you’re in the San Francisco/San Jose area, please stop by the Black Sheep guild meeting to say hi!  (Directions can be found here.)

Today was a holiday in the U.S., celebrating the great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  (Who – in addition to being a great civil rights leader – is also a fantastic writer; his sermon “The Drum Major Instinct” is one of the best and most powerful essays I’ve ever read.  If you haven’t read it, get your hands on a copy – it’s excellent, and it will make you think!)

Anyway, I had the day off, so I decided to put it to good use.  I had finished weaving and fringing the qiviut shawl yesterday, so as soon as Mike got up, I tossed it into the “magic water” and wet-finished it, giving it a good hard press with the iron to bring up the shine of the silk.  I still need to toss it in the dryer on “air fluff” to bring up more of the qiviut halo, but it’s basically done.

And it is pretty!

I wish you could feel it – it’s softer than cashmere!  The qiviut is extremely fine and halos nicely, so it feels delightfully furry.  Too bad I have to pack it off to the person who commissioned it!

Then I got to work in earnest.  I skeined up some 2/28 nm silk and some 2/28 nm merino wool, and tossed it into the dye pot along with quite a bit of black dye.  While the dye bath was cooking, I unchained the painted warp and started threading.  About halfway through threading, I took a break, rinsed out the dyed skeins, and tossed them into the oven to dry.  (Yes, I cheat!  It’s amazing how fast a skein dries when put in the oven at 180-190 degrees, with the door cracked open.)  By the time I was done threading, sleying, tying on, and weighting the warp, the skeins were fully dry.  So I quickly wound a pirn of black 2/28 silk and wove this sample:

After that, I switched to a black 2/28 nm wool weft, and changed the stripes so they lined up, alternating:

I liked this effect enough that I’m weaving a scarf from it.  I’ve woven 27″ so far, so about another 30-40″ to go.  I feel kind of guilty about not using this entire warp for sampling – there are a couple of other things I’d like to try, including another attempt at a semirandom arrangement of stripes – but it’s so pretty, I’d like to make something out of it!

I’m too tired to weave more tonight (I’ve been doing weaving-related stuff for almost 12 hours straight!), so I think I will go eat dinner, and try finishing the scarf tomorrow.  I’m hoping to finish the samples tomorrow – which will take some intense weaving in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening – so I can wet-finish them on Wednesday.  On Thursday I am the program speaker for my guild, talking about the creative process, and I’d like to show them as examples of my creative process-in-progress.  Also, Sharon (the master couturier behind the wedding dress) will be at the presentation, and I’m hoping to show the samples to her and get her opinion on which of the samples would be most appropriate for the jacket I’m contemplating.

All in all, a satisfyingly productive day.

Off to dinner!  I was too busy weaving to eat earlier, and it’s catching up to me.

I painted the warp yesterday.  Here it is:

In the top section, I applied a different color every 2″; some of the colors bled into each other, which is why there is almost no turquoise and almost no gold.

In the second section, also a different color every 2″, but I diluted the dye by 50%.  The result is a more intense chroma (“brighter”) color and also a slight lightening of the mid-range colors.

In the third section, the dye is also diluted but the sections are 4″ long (there is now noticeably more gold).

I painted all the sections at once, so they would line up perfectly if I chose to go that route, and so the repeats would be regular.  I have not yet decided how to stagger the sections.  Here are two possibilities: regular and semi-random:

Of these I like the semi-random better.  The first one is visually confusing as the eye staggers back and forth between the lines of turquoise and gold; the second one spreads out  the dots of lighter-value color, so the eye flits back and forth between them, taking in the other colors as it goes.

Note that the semi-random is not actually random; in fact, it is very carefully arranged so the colors do NOT line up with each other (rather like a satin draft).  I don’t want the colors “pooling” into a single larger section; I want the mix of colors to be consistent along the entire length of the fabric.  This is because garment design is much simpler if you don’t have a huge, unexpected blob of some random color (especially yellow) to contend with.  This is why I carefully lined the warps up and painted them together, so I could avoid that spacing.

This particular semi-random has a diagonal running down it (follow the turquoise sections to see), which I would probably eliminate when actually warping up the sample.

What now?  Well, I need to weave it up.  I have thought about how best to handle warping for this sample, and think that it’s probably best not to beam on the warp at all, but to throw it in chains off the back of the loom.  Or, more accurately, to put it through a raddle and over the top of the trapeze.

Doing it this way will allow me to try different arrangements of the warp chains “on the fly”.  Between samples, I can pull one or more sections forward until they line up as I want, and because the warp chains are independently weighted, it won’t affect the other warp chains.  If I beam onto the back beam, I’m committed to a single arrangement of warp chains for the entire duration of the piece.  So hanging off a trapeze will be better for my sampling.

First, however, I need to finish the qiviut scarf!  It is on the loom with about 8″ woven.  Mike is napping right now, but as soon as he gets up, I’m going to start weaving again.  I’m hoping to finish it this afternoon, so I can start getting the painted warp onto the loom!