DECISION TIME

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

The time has come for me to knuckle down and make color decisions.  This is always an exciting and yet very frightening time for me.  Suddenly I feel so helpless.  I feel like I am acting on whims and can no longer see what the piece is going to look like.  Its idea is gone.  Everything feels like guessing.

But I have made my decisions and I have worked out the dyeing details insofar as I could.

Basically I am using only colors that come from my yellow-green/red-violet dyeing samples.  This is a safe decision because each color will relate in some way to all the other colors.  And it is a complementary color-scheme. There are some exceptions, but those exceptions will happen in the less obvious binder wefts.

For the warp I decided to use three very dull colors, one which veers towards the red-violet, the other two which veer a bit to the yellow-green. The colors will move from left to center and from right to center.  Calculations for these yarns are easy.  I will simply dye three Treenway 60/2 silk skeins.  They weigh 100 grams each.  The calculations are already done.

The warp yarn colors will be the background support for the weft yarns. It is in the weft yarns that the major color play will happen. The pattern wefts will use these same dulled warp colors, plus various gradations of the brighter yellow-green as well as the pure red-violet. The binder wefts, in 120/2 silk,  will be the same colors plus there will be some red, blue, and yellow wefts.  Not very much of this latter group.

I  have worked out how many yards I want for each of the colors I am going to use, for both the 120/2 silk and the 60/2 silk.Now I have to wind these off into skeins and weigh them before I can complete the calculations.

Related Posts: 
Yellow-Greens and Some Red-Violet
More on Color

"Decision Time” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on October 27, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.