Finished weaving up the sample this morning:

The top row of peacock feathers is the previous design, the bottom row is the new design.

Changes:

• Eliminated the areas of blended black and green around the outer edges of the feather
• Replaced the dark green weft with a bright emerald green weft
• Lengthened the shaft of the feather so it blended nicely with the end of the previous feather

Thoughts:

• The new feather seems a lot fuller than the previous feather, because I eliminated the blended black and green areas, but I may add them back – it “feels” maybe a little TOO bold, could use some toning down.  Interesting since I really didn’t think the blended black and green sections were visibly different, but it does make a difference!
• I like the longer feather shaft, the feather now feels complete instead of being crammed in with the next feather.
• Bright emerald green weft works better than the darker green weft.  The pattern shows more clearly.

I will add back the areas of blended green and black and weave up another feather or two, and see if I like that better.  (The threads for the full shawl have not yet arrived, so I can’t start weaving the “real thing” yet!)

I changed the original design for the peacock feathers to include more solid black between the feathery parts.  Here’s how it came out (look at the bottom row for the best view, as the top row still has the top part of the previous version):

Contrast this with Round 1:

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…

I spent part of yesterday browsing through the drafts on Handweaving.net, looking for inspiration.  One of the drafts looked a little like peacock feathers, and that struck me as a fruitful subject: it would turn one of the disadvantages of multiweft taquete, the fact that the colors on the bottom show through, into a major plus.  Peacock feathers are iridescent! so having small glints of the other colors showing would be perfect.

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:

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:

And then, of course, I wove it up:

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!