30/10/2009

Autumn leaves, version 1

When this was just made, I thought it would be nice to make a V-shawl in the same technique. Someday.
The day dawned. Now it was autumn, and the yellow-green-orange leaves looked inspiring.



As the "summer skies" scarf is an 8-shaft design that in reality requires 10 shafts (2 extra shafts are needed for the rightmost stripe, if you don't want to cut the weft after every cotton block...), and I "only" have 16, I had to find a design that takes 6 shafts + the two extra.
I thought that would be a piece of the proverbial cake.



Before I had the design done, I selected the yarns, and wound the warp. As it was an experiment, I settled for scarf width, rather than shawl width.

The designing proved to be difficult - there aren't many designs possible with only three blocks. But, as I already had the warp on the loom, I went ahead anyway.



When I came to the weaving-together part I noticed that, somewhere, I had made a mistake... but, perhaps, it would not look too bad after the wet finishing?



It did. Look too bad, that is... 6-shaft designs are not good for this kind of technique, the non-shrinking layer has to be more interlaced with the shrinking layer. The mistake helps somewhat - the strange assymetry adds some interest, but, on the whole, I consider this a mistake not to try again.

No comments: