Ann is a long-time friend and fellow weaver. I read part of her post elsewhere and thought it would be a good addition to our color discussion. Designing anything is a challenge – I learned from Ann’s process. Here are her thoughts –
I spent the winter weaving a scarf for my lovely daughter-in-law Kelly. She had mentioned, when looking at another scarf I made, that she really liked the teal and fuchsia yarns. So my task this winter was to make her a scarf! I knew that I wanted the fluid hand of Tencel yarn, so I decided to use 8/2 Tencel.
I started with the Crackle weave scarf pattern from a recent Handwoven (Jan 2014), changing things just a bit: instead of silk, I used Tencel, and instead of the colors in Handwoven, I used fuchsia and teal yarn that Kelly liked. I used a blue yarn from my stash for the third color–ending up with the left hand scarf below.
But in most light, this scarf is too dark—you can’t see the different squares very well. So I started looking for a lighter, brighter color to add to the mix. I sampled a pink yarn, but that obscured the Teal/Fuchsia look of the scarf (middle weaving). So—I went to the color wheel and looked for something at the other side of the wheel. Jean had some coral yarn in her stash, and I went with it! This scarf was not right either (far right scarf). The blue/coral look was so much more prominent than the teal/fuchsia.
At this stage of the process, I remembered the author saying that the order of the colors is really important. Maybe I should move to a different weave structure, one that will allow me to emphasize the two colors Kelly really liked. So I moved to an undulating twill weave structure, and the first attempt used the teal as a warp and fuchsia as a weft (the right hand scarf below), but that seemed a bit bland, and then I remembered that Kelly liked the horizontal stripes on a previous scarf I made for David. So I tried another version of Kelly’s scarf, one with the same teal warp and undulating twill, but now I varied the weft with broad horizontal stripes of fuchsia, blue, and teal, with more narrow stripes at the ends of the scarf—including a narrow stripe of pink—to brighten things up a bit. This is the scarf on the left.
Still not satisfied, my last attempt went for some vertical stripes using the teal and fuchsia but adding the blue for variety and the pink for contrast. Kelly scarf #5 is a broken twill designed to preserved the colors in the warp stripes.
Is this the Kelly-scarf I’ve been pursuing all winter? No! So what have I learned? Yikes! Designing is hard!! Getting the right weave structure married to the right colors in the right order with the right ratios using the right yarn is no easy task!! So will I retreat to weaving only straight from the patterns? Probably not. If it were so easy, would it be worth doing?
All those “what if” questions are what makes the exploration of fiber and weaving so much fun. I wonder what Kelly thinks of all those scarves. J
Thanks Jean! Kelly’s first choice was the peach crackle–so surprised! But she also chose # 3, the simple undulating twill, and she helped me design one more: black warped undulating twill with large black bands on the ends and the same wide bands of fushia, teal, and blue as scarf #4. I’m excited!