Making Plans for the Future

 

I wanted to have some silk to wet finish and since I have a, um, generous supply of it, went digging.  I found enough of one colourway to make a warp long enough for two scarves and started weaving the first one yesterday.  I nearly finished it, but my new way of living is to pay more attention when my body begins to object and instead of pushing through the last 20" yesterday, I stopped and will finish today.  The goal is to get this warp off the loom tomorrow.

Part of the challenge with a shrinking stash is finding colours I want to use together.  The warp is a dip dyed skein (four of them, 50 grams each) in fairly loud colours with that bright magenta and a blue that has quite a lot of cyan in it.  It's fairly brazen, really, and I searched around for a while until I found the weft for this one - a very dark olive.  It looks quite nice in real life - the camera was having trouble getting a good representation of the actual colours.  

The dark olive toned down the magenta.  A lot!  It turned the cyan into more of a teal.  I have enough of the olive I could have done both scarves the same, but if I'm going to think ahead to the autumn and the guild sale, I'd like to have more colour choices, so I dug around again and found a deep purple.  That should work well with these colours as well.

Because value is more important than hue.

I still have a lot of the dip dyed silk left but I'm low on solid colours to weave with, so late last night I quite literally threw my hands up, looked at my other options, and decided I will weave the silk as warp, then cross it will one of my rather large selection of rayon yarns.  Weaving something only half silk means I can keep the price lower and since I've done this combination before, I know I'll get a nice textile for my efforts.

Once this warp comes off the loom, I have three more yarn samples to test weave.  I aim to do one a day, and have all of the weaving for the Next Big Project done by the end of the week.  Then I'll keep going on the Leclerc (the Megado is being reserved for some ghost weaving I've been asked to do) and whittle away at my hand dyed silk and rayon yarns.  It means fringe twisting will be piling up.  However, since I am restricting how many hours I weave, I can be fringe twisting during the day and hopefully stay on top of it.  And then, of course, the wet finishing.  

But in the end I should wind up with a few more silk+ scarves for the guild sale.  I'm meeting with another guild member tomorrow night to discuss how we will manage the sale, given the continuing covid issues.

In spite of the world seeming to be going to hell in a hand basket, I will keep looking forward.  Planning for the future.  Hoping for the best (while preparing for the 'worst' - in this case postponing the NBP).