Showing posts with label Fibonacci. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fibonacci. Show all posts

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Mistakes



One of my mentors always used to say "If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't learning anything."  And would then share her latest 'mistakes' and the lessons she'd learned from them.

So very early in my career I learned that displeasing results were not terminal, just a stepping stone on the journey of learning.

This series of towels is meant to use up a bunch of yarn that I either inherited or purchased to re-sell.  I began, as I usually do, by making a striped design that appealed to me (based on the Fibonacci series) and then began to play with the colours to go into those stripes.

I set myself some design constraints:  the centre stripe would be one of the variegated cotton yarns I'd bought to sell, the weft would be yarn from Lynn's Legacy or, if that didn't have the right colour for the warp, from cotton slub I'd bought to sell.

The centre stripe on this warp is a rather dull and fairly dark varigation with a 'sad' green (with a bit of blue), lavender, and a dark-ish greyed blue.  I didn't have the right shade of lavender so I went with a quite dark value purple, which I'm still not sure I like but does give the rather dull warp a little 'zing'.  And of course I never judge a textile on the loom but only after wet finishing.

The colour palette isn't to my personal taste, but for those who like more subdued hues, I think this is working ok.  In spite of that dull beige stripe which, quite frankly, I agonized over.

The weft is a dull sage green which seems to be working as I'd hoped and pulling all the different colours together visually.  

Currently reading Hidden Figures.  I bought the DVD and will watch that with Mary in June.  But movies never have the scope to go into detail so I'm glad I'm reading the book beforehand.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Subdued


towels


close up - showing hem woven in 2/16 cotton and towel body in the cotton slub/linen


White dilutes
Grey muddies
Black intensifies

This little mantra will help in choosing appropriate colours for your textiles.

I think you can see quite clearly that the deeper colours of the warp are being subdued by the pale weft I'm using.

So it appears that the four cones I had decided to use up this time are much bigger in real life than expected.  I'd assumed that the cones were about 2 pounds.  Except that two of them are 3.5 pounds each, and the other 2 are 2.5 pounds.  With 3100 yards per pound, that is about 37,000 yards, give or take the cone weight.  I number crunched and discovered that 12 pounds of this cotton/linen yarn is enough weft for (wait for it) +90 towels.  !

Well, I won't be using up this yarn any time soon.  I don't have the time to make 90+ towels before the show season starts, nor do I need that many towels for inventory.  I've actually got quite a good inventory of towels because I've been weaving them on the AVL on 30 and 40 yard long warps.

So I will do a few warps with this combination, then it will be time to weave up some rayon chenille for scarves - because two simply isn;t enough - and then finish with a few more place mat warps.  I took a look at inventory the other day and there aren't nearly as many mats on the shelves as I expected to see!