The Fair Entry That Didn't Make It

I was ambitious when I thought about what to enter in the County Fair this year.  I entered 5 items but only 4 were finished by the deadline.  I almost had a good reason.

The last piece was a shawl that I did finish after the Fair was over.  I found some interesting yarn that I had to have.  It had several different textures: chenille, a sleek nylon cord, a couple of different slubby yarns, etc.  I thought it would be fantastic. 

Of course I didn't think about the fact that these were just different yarns tied together.  As I was winding the warp, I quickly found that the yarns were tied with BIG knots that couldn't be left in the warp.  The length of each type of yarn was only long enough for 4 warp threads, with almost another whole (but not quite) warp thread length left.  So there was lots of waste. 

I didn't have enough yarn for the warp I had planned, so I supplemented it with Tahki Cotton Classic in a very close shade of light blue.  I set the warp at 8 epi. I might have sett it at 6 epi. if I had had a six-dent reed.  I wove it in plain weave.  I found that some of the larger slubs in one of the yarn textures was almost too big to fit through the 8 dent reed and they hung up a little in the heddle eyes.  Fortunately there was only one broken thread due to the slubs and that was at the very beginning.  The weaving was slower than it might ordinarily - due to these fat slubs.

Here is a picture of the shawl on the loom.  The color isn't quite as dramatic as in the picture, although there was color differences between the different yarn types.

The shawl did turn out very nicely.  I twisted the fringe with a hair twister since with the different kinds of yarn, the fringe looked pretty messy.  The twisted fringe was a bit heavy, but it looks nice.

It didn't make it to the Fair, but it was a learning experience.

Monochromatic Towels

The second to last picture in my project to capture calendar colors in towels is November.  It is all blues from icy white blue to greenish blue. 

These were threaded in an M & W twill pattern and treadled using the same 2-2-1-1-1 twill sequence as the others.  I thought I was winding on enough warp for 12 towels however, as I was weaving towels 13-15, I realized I must have made a mistake in the original measurement.  Fortunately they turned out looking really nice. 

I haven't included detailed pictures of all of the colors since the values were generally close.  Here is a selection of the more dramatic results.  The weft colors are dark green, crab (light yellow green), light silver and medium silver. 

In the course of this exploration into color, I've found that the greys and silvers have been a great addition to the other colors in the pallet. 




I bought a set of gray 10/2 cotton from Lunatic Fringe a while back.  I'm interested in doing some towels in gradations of gray some day.












I have one more picture to use as inspiration.  It's pretty exciting to think about being finished with this project, but it will be a challenging set of colors to work with. 

Then I'm not sure what will be next...