Water, Water, Everywhere

A few days ago, the season hereabouts abruptly made the switch from summer to autumn, heralded by the Mother of All Storms on Saturday — packed with rain and high winds.  Each day since, there’s been additional rain, and this afternoon a rare thunderstorm with torrents of water pouring down.  Exciting times.

It seems appropriate, then, to be engaged in working on the scarf series I’m calling Tropical Waters, the components of which I showed at the end of my last posting.  Plenty of progress, albeit slowly, has taken place since then.  First up, the process of getting what turned out to be a tricky warp onto the loom —

Random distribution of the slippery turquoise rayon ~

Add in the purple rayon slub (also random distribution) ~

Fill in with the skinny beautiful hand-dyed rayon ~

The full effect is better seen from behind the reed ~

And then came the threading through the heddles, in a fancy complex twill that I’d designed on the computer, after which a day’s worth of winding the ten-yard-long warp from the front to the back of the loom — an exercise in extreme patience due to the propensity of those skinny threads to enjoy twisting around each other and threatening to break.  Here they are between the reed and the heddles, looking oh so innocent ~

and wound around the warp beam at the back of the loom, everything nice and smooth and well-behaved ~

Once I began weaving, I found myself treating the warp with extreme caution in fear that some of those fine threads would snap under the normal weaving tension.  Happily, that has not been the case, and progress, though slow, is steady and most gratifying.

Here’s the first scarf, woven with a peacock-blue fine pearl cotton ~

And the second, woven with a fine turquoise pearl cotton ~

You can see that depending on the angle of viewing, the pattern looks substantially different.  Seen in person, it’s spectacular, because the entire warp practically glitters, giving the weaving an extra measure of depth and interest.

There will be two more scarves after these, which you’ll simply have to wait till next week to ogle.  You won’t be sorry you had to wait!