Coral Warp

The coral warp is actually quite bright but today is a dull day and perhaps my camera just couldn't cope with the bright coral - who knows.  It looks rather subdued in the photo in comparison to real life.

Anyway, the warp was bright enough that I wanted to tone it down a bit.  I'm not really a 'brown' person but I had quite a bit of a natural brown singles alpaca that was about the same value or slightly deeper than the coral that I thought would do a good job.  I've also got a wool/angora in natural white that I'll use on this warp as well.  The white will also serve to 'dilute' the bright coral.

The challenge on this cloth is that the weft wants to pack in at 17 ppi while the pick wheel choice is either 16 or 18.  I've gone with the 18 which means that every few inches I have to 'catch up' to keep the fell line in a good position for weaving.  I could have used the 16 ppi option but I was thinking that would make the cloth a tiny bit sleazy.  Even though there is a good percentage of wool in the yarn, there are enough other fibres included that fulling will be compromised somewhat.

My AVL has been pretty heavily modified which means that it doesn't have quite the same tolerance for the fell line moving out of the optimal position as an unmodified AVL would have.  However, the incentive to use up this particular yarn is very high - both the warp and the weft - so I'm willing to fiddle a bit to weave up fabric that will not only use the yarn up, but make a nice quality of fabric while so doing.

On the reading front I've started and rejected two books.  It used to be that if I started a book, even if I wasn't enjoying it, I'd grit my teeth and finish it.  No longer.  If I'm going to spend that much time with a book it has to engage my interest and not insult me with silly errors of time line or characters that just are plain nasty or boring.

Currently reading Cut to the Chase by Joan Boswell