Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Exploring October

I'm taking a big color leap with this set of towels. Although they look garish, I think they will turn out OK. This has been an interesting experiment.
For this set, I used the random stripe generator, but as with the January towels, I modified the pattern I selected so that the colors were closer in proportion to the picture and values weren't tilted too far to the high value colors - i.e., less red and orange and bright green.





I will be threading these in an "M" twill - 1 to 8; 7-5; 6-8 and back to 1 . The December towels' dornick twill was a bit too choppy, but the diagonal and diamond patterns in the other towels look really good.
We'll have to see.




I may have sold almost all of the January towels without a picture, but I will see if I can find one and post it later. They turned out really great.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

January Towels

The next set of towels is the January Picture. It is of Point Betsy in Northern Lower Michigan. It looked all ice and cold, but when wound on as warp, it translated to Fourth of July.


I'm sure that it will be toned down when crossed with a weft of light blue or even white.


I used the Random Stripe Generator, but this time I figured out the proportion of each color in the picture. I then adjusted the stripe width and colors to reflect that proportion. So it's random with help.




I am threading this set as a point twill but weaving it with the treadling from the last set -- a 1-1-1-2-3 twill. I might even attempt diamonds.

Interesting Color Exploration

I finished the ten towels with the "September" colors. They looked much better than I would have expected as I wound the warp. I used yellow, gold, light blue, green and dark brown for the wefts.


These were threaded as a straight draw and treadled in a 1-1-2-3 twill. I wove most of these with a point treadling. A couple were done as a straight twill, but they weren't quite as interesting.



The gold really made the colors look deep and complex. The brown was pretty surprising - the picture doesn't do it justice.

These are not my colors but I would definitely use them again.