Designing and Color

Usually I try not to engage in weaving activities on the weekend. Rest from such intense activity is, I believe, helpful. I tend to focus on gardening, though fiber activities are also usually included. Fiber activities include spinning, knitting and sewing.

I have been slowly working up to designing my son's annual Christmas sweater. On Sunday, I finally finished the process and began the knitting. I looked at the design and the yarn. The design is stripes, but the design of the stripe continually changes up through the entire sweater. I have never designed a sweater like this. And I thought, what about a woven scarf....... OK, I know it's Sunday, but I continued on with the thinking process anyway.

I could weave a crackle scarf in a stripe design similar to the stripe design of this sweater. The same color would sometimes repeat for a long time. In that instance, I could continue to change the treadling, but just keep the colors the same.

Then I looked at the colors I was working with in my son's sweater: a dark brown, a beige, a dark blue, and a dark red. These have not been typical of my usual color choices. And the brown and the beige dominate. The neutrals dominate. The colors are accents. And then I thought about the crackle jacket fabric. The neutrals dominate, the colors are accents. Without realizing it, I have been moving forward on a path in color designing a path which began with the use of bright and saturated colors almost exclusively. Yes, there were occasionally dark colors, but they were always clearly colors. There was nothing neutral about them.

And then I began to think about the next crackle fabric after this one. I had already thought of it in terms of deep browns and golds and blues, with slashes of black. There on the left is the original inspiration. Things could be getting interesting.

Meanwhile, it's time to get back to that warping board.