Chocolate

 

The next few scarves will be woven with a dark chocolate brown weft.  The photo doesn't do the depth of colour justice - take my word for it - it's a lot darker than this.

I worked with indie dyers to get colours specific to my needs.  Generally I asked them to make 'semi-solids', not level.  If I was paying for custom colours, I wanted something not available commercially.  Although, truth to be told, I was asking them for colours I couldn't get commercially.

The lighter value in this brown is not as light as it looks so the overall effect is what dyers tend to refer to as 'abrash'.

The warp is quite dark value to begin with - a rust red, a kind of forest green and some black.  To add a dark chocolate brown was a 'safe' choice.  It was also the 'best' choice I had available, unless I wanted a lot of rust red Tencel weft scarves.  Which would have been fine, but...I had these skeins of dark chocolate rayon.

This yarn is quite a bit finer than the 2/8 Tencel and the resulting cloth is quite a lovely lightweight fabric which should work well for summer.  It's got a nice hand or drape.  The weave structure is a combination of twill and plain weave.  The density of the warp was chosen for the slightly thicker yarns I'm also trying to use up and to make the fabric be 'balanced' I added plain weave to the tie up.  

I was going to change the tie-up and treadling for each of the four scarves, but you can't really see the weave structure anyway so I'm just going to make all four the same.  

The 'abrash' of the weft is going to make them look slightly different so all in all, I'm not motivated to spend the time conjuring up 3 more options for weaving.

The guild room sale is over and this week everything will get moved next door to the Studio Shop.  Since the Studio Shop is a lot better known, AND it's on the ground floor, not up a long staircase, we are hoping for a nice ending of our sale.  

The year is nearly over and suddenly those distant deadlines are looming (pun alert) and I find I'm needing to scramble a bit to get everything done that needs doing.

I'm also beginning to fill my calendar with guild programs via Zoom so if anyone is interested, they should contact me soon-ish.  With my on line classes launching in January, I will become a bit busy in in the new year.

We are still a week away from the solstice and the weather report for the coming two weeks is cold, cold, cold, with a serving of Omicron.  I'm grateful for the chance to keep teaching - safely - even if on line isn't ideal!

My yarn order should be here, maybe before Christmas.  In the meantime I'll keep working on scarves.  I should finish this warp this week, then put on another one in hopes of emptying more cones.  Or at least making them smaller!  And then I'll go back to tea towels.  But I may do a 2/20 mercerized warp first in an effort to use up that really fine linen I was given a couple of years ago.  Stash reduction.  It's progressing.