Thursday last week I received the information for the Blue Ridge Handweaving Show being held this fall in Asheville, NC. It is a show that happens every other year and I have entered stuff the last two times. I put the notice on my bulletin board so as not to lose/forget it.
That night I had a lot of trouble going to sleep. The information had raised my anxiety level. There was no question that if it turned out, one of my submissions would be the jacket I am going to weave from the crackle fabric I just finished weaving. But I wanted to submit a second item. Yardage? Not really, but that seemed to be the only thing I could do given my current weaving trials. I decided that I could just take either the red polychrome or the blue polychrome treadlings and weave one of them as yardage. No big deal. And that is when anxiety struck.
Simply taking a sample and weaving it up as yardage with no changes, just doing it, simply did not feel right for me. Did I really want to take a good part of my weaving time to make nothing but an enlarged copy? All that I would gain, personally, would be a bit more in weaving skills, perhaps. Is this what I wanted? I tossed and turned and fretted. I got up and spun for awhile.
I returned to bed, was relaxed and almost asleep. Then the show came back to haunt me. But this time an idea appeared. I could gradate the warp gradually from reds to golds, maybe back again, maybe repeating the gradation. I smiled.
Then all at once, I realized my solution for the next crackle scarf. I have been struggling with the handling of the colors for a long time now. And I could simply do the same thing with the scarf that I planned for the yardage, but with blues and neutrals. Start at the bottom with a bit of all blue, gradually move to the neutrals, do those for a fair amount of space and then move back to the blues. Maybe have a bit of blue somewhere in the middle. As for the warps, I will dye some different neutrals to wind the warp with. I then plan to dip dye parts of the warp blue.
This next scarf I will weave while making weft choices and probably block length choices as well. I will be trying to work out my vision as I weave. I love to weave this way! Hopefully in this way I will also work out, at least partially some of the issues I will face with the yardage. I smiled again. I slept.
Of course there will be more changes between now and then, but at least I'm getting closer.........
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2 comments:
It sounds as if you had a good night's work there, sorting out these ideas! I like concept for the graduated colour in your crackle scarf. Isn't that the kind of thing that crackle is particularly suited to?
I am encouraged to find that other weavers find the night sleeping time as an opportunity to stress over weaving solutions. My greatest ideas have always come to me in the shower. I think the water helps to free them somehow? I really enjoyed your posts on distractions too...as I have many of them. Sometimes they are exhilarating, and othertimes they are a burden.
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