Developing a Line

Since I am a production weaver, one of the things I do is work in series - or a 'line'. 

This is a photo of some of the table runners that I wove for the craft fairs last fall.  I wanted them to be thicker than towels so instead of 20 epi, which is what I use these yarns at to make towels, I increased the epi to 24.  A good example of making different qualities of cloth of exactly the same yarns by changing the density and the weave structure.

I began by deciding if I wanted the main focus of the table runner to be the centre, or along the sides.  In this case I chose the sides, so these stripes are repeated on the other selvedge and the middle is plain.

Using Fibonacci, I worked up a stripe sequence I felt was pleasing, fiddled with it, and then started working on the colours I would use.

In each case the variegated yarn was chosen first.  There are three sizes of stripes in the runners, one stripe an outline of two threads of a solid accent colour, and then the background another solid colour.

This is perhaps most visible in the two top runners - the very top one is less orange in real life and more of a 'rose'.  As it happens the variegated yarn is the same in the top two runners but with such a big difference in the main solid, the variegated stripes look quite different, especially once the weft crossed it.

In the upper runner the weft was a rose the same hue as the background.  In the peach runner, the weft is pretty much the same hue as the background.

The rose is darker in value than any of the colours in the variegated so the variegated yarn stands out more than in the peach because the value of the peach is much closer to the same value of the colours in the variegated which tends to subdue the variegated.

Most people would have to look very closely to see that the variegated yarns in those two runners are the same yarn.

I wound up weaving 10 different warps, all with different colours but all in the same stripe design.