Spring Vibe

You may have noticed that I skipped a week appearing here.  My baby brother (two years younger than me) came for a visit from his mountain stronghold in Truckee, California, and I pretty  much gave myself over to spending time with him.  We had the best time together in many years.  Maybe ever.  As children, we fought a lot — the outcome of adults around us unthinkingly pitting us against each other.  It took long years, really until less than ten years ago, for us to be friends and to genuinely enjoy and understand each other.  That’s not to say we don’t still go head to head sometimes; we do, but now we’re able to step back and ultimately chuckle at our respective intransigence.  I love the guy a lot.

The work on “Departure” continues, and as of today is in the homestretch.  In my last post, I showed you the first scarf in the series, but will show it again here to have most of them all together.  So here’s #1 ~

The weft yarn in that one is a pale green tencel, and in the second one (below) the weft is a pale pink tencel called “Apricot Blossom”, a fitting name ~

You’ll notice that some of these photos seem warm in tone, and some quite cool.  The warmer ones are more accurate; the cooler ones were taken on cloudy days, so there was no ambient sunlight to warm things up, literally as well as figuratively.

Here’s #3, woven with pale silver grey tencel, very subtle ~

You can see the wonderful texture contributed by the oddly-spun rayon secondary yarn; it’s likely to be even more obvious after these are off the loom, washed and ironed.

Finally, #4, woven with a fine pale lavender pearl cotton called “Orchid”, another fitting name ~

Bonus points if you correctly guess the name of my feline quality control supervisor.  She was a bit irritated at being disallowed to do testing on the weaving rather than near it.  I was firmly unsympathetic.

There’s one more to be woven — the weft will be an ivory tencel, which is likely to accentuate the subtle colors of the warp rather than blending with them.  Photos next week, along with the previously-promised explanation of how I go about planning and designing a warp.  Be prepared for some mathematical calculations, albeit relatively simple ones!