This morning I woke up early and knew that I wasn’t going to catch that extra half hour of delicious ‘second sleep’ so I decided to just cut my losses and get up. It was so early in fact that I was in time to watch the sunrise – something that I don’t seem to do very often any more – and what a beautiful morning it was.
A troubled sky like this is unusual for this time of the year, but I’m guessing that the lower layer of cloud will burn off quite quickly and then we will have another beautiful Autumn day to enjoy.
As most of you probably already know, I have been working on a doubleweave sampler on my small eight shaft loom. I actually took an on-line course with Cally Booker, and am slowly making my way through the material. The course was AMAZING!! It was challenging and thought provoking and it did me the world of good to be a student for a change instead of the teacher.
However – there’s often an ‘however’ in the story isn’t there?
‘However’, I am now going to admit something – out here, in the open, full disclosure……
One of the things that I always tell my students when we are preparing for a class, is that they really should use yarn that pleases them and that will do the project justice. Stashbusting is all very well in some circumstances, but when you are settling in to learn a new craft or a explore a new technique I believe that we need to give ourselves every opportunity to do the best work that we can – even if only for a sampler. So, I recommend that my prospective students treat themselves to some nice yarn in colours that please them, that they will enjoy using. A bag of left-overs from other projects is not really going to fill the creative gap.
Well, for my doubleweave sampler for Cally’s course, I went against my own strict principles, and dug deep into my storage boxes to see what I could find…, and I came up with a fairly random selection of colours – a nice sunshine yellow, a range of blues, a little bit of white and a good rich chocolate brown which was to be my ‘neutral’ colour. When I say neutral, I don’t mean neutral in shade, I mean the colour of one of the layers – we had one layer a solid colour and the other layer as random as you please.
The brown wasn’t my first choice, but I knew that the project was going to be yarn thirsty, and I knew that I had enough of it – the grey that I really liked was in short supply. Hmmph.
Anyway, long story short, I planned and made my warp and started off, and the colours worked out really rather well. The contrast between the brown and everything else was strong and crisp, and showed the technique really well.
This was at the very beginning…..
Much later on, as things developed, we started to experiment with different combinations and structures, and also added in some extra colours. Because I had disregarded my own advice to my students, I found that possibilities in my by now almost empty box were in short supply, and so I settled on a pale pink ( I am NOT a pale pink person at all, so I have quite a bit of this – because I never use it….) and there was the little bit of grey still in the box, so I decided to give that a go too.
Look at the difference….
The grey totally softens the intensity of the brown. This in turn softens the impact of the colours – just that one simple changeover alters the whole character of the piece.
Then I went off at a complete tangent – because I had had enough of blocks and I still had the pink I wanted to try – this was the result of that little experiment:
The pale pink softens the contrast of the stark bright white, and the grey mutes everything, and if I had woven this section after I’d seen the sunrise this morning, I could have said that the beautiful start to this day was my inspiration for this block! The colour palette is almost identical to the photo that I took this morning, and I love how the grey calms everything down – it is hard to believe that this is the same warp as those strong strident blocks in the first pic.
This has been such an interesting journey for me – even if I did break my own rule about stash-busting for a course, I think that my left-overs have provided quite a few happy accidents on this one.
I’m so excited to finish this off, (and see what’s happening on the bottom layer) and to start planning one for the 16 shaft……
Until next week, wishing you happy weaving…. and joyous learning…. and glorious sunrises in abundance!
