Undulations - real and perceived.

Side 1 4CDW Reverse 4CDW

.

Ripple Scarf

(Sometimes Blogger drives me crazy - I cannot put these photos in the order I would prefer so I will leave them thus and give up!) Please view the photos in reverse order to make sense of the text.

Neki and I have been talking about texture in weaving. This helped me remember a scarf I wove a few years ago - the aim of the exercise simply was to produce a cloth with texture. Many weavers have done this much better than I have ever managed but I was quite proud of this result. I am not quite sure at this distance in time exactly where I got the idea. I think the original fabric inspiration was a 3/1 , 1/3 striped fabric of Bonnie Inouye’s. Since I used 3/1, 1/3 twills often in my weaving it was an easy design to play with, and even easier to weave. The warp was a fairly loosely spun cream wool, 2/18 or thereabouts, (as you can see this was well documented!) and the weft was a more evenly spun 2/24 wool. The secret to the ripples is in the afterwash treatment. After milling, I hung it from the clothes line (quite wet) and tied a half full milk container of water from the other end and pulled the scarf into shape as it dried. Then of course, no pressing! This scarf is so soft and warm - it is one of the few I still own but I am pleased that I managed to hang onto this one.

My next piece is, in some ways, much more interesting – it has marvellous ups and downs but is a smooth piece of fabric. I do hope you can see these undulations in the photos. The structure is one of my favourites – four coloured double weave. The yarn is 2/20 cotton – the musk pink thread in the warp is unmercerised but the other three yarns are mercerised. I am not sure why or how I managed to acquire that musk pink (and I had a kg) but was over the moon to discover I could mess around with its ugliness as well as I did in this piece. Colour is so intriguing!

From the time this fabric started to appear and I realised what was happening I was smitten . From then I felt that I only wanted to weave cloth with hills and valleys. I have not always been as successful as I would like. Whereas sometimes it occurs without even trying - on other occasions it can take a great deal of effort. It all seems to depend on a mysterious interaction between colours (both hues and values) and structure. I have also achieved the effect using a shadow weave structure and 6 colours. It is just magic that sometimes you can make all these elements sing in tune.

From this one warp and a variety of weft colours I made a series of table runners with coordinating plain weave serviettes . Some of the colours had deeper furrows than others. Not sure I have any photographs of them, unfortunately, as I have given away all those runners and this is the only scrap left.