365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Monday, September 13, 2021
Fiber Adventures
Day 335: A friend recently remarked that she enjoys following my "fiber adventures," and the term "adventure" seemed particulary apt, given that I love to experiment with new techniques and colour treatments. Currently, I'm on a "shaded" binge which began with wanting to use up a small ball of space-dyed 8/2 cotton. The result was the lovely purple and blue scarf I featured here on September 6. A survey of my stash didn't yield any more variegated thread, so I grabbed three closely allied colours of #3 perle cotton and used them to make an inkle-woven band. By arranging the warp with the two medium-hued shades on either side of the darker colour, the finished band had the shimmery appearance of having been made with a variegated thread. I used the same principle to warp the "autumn" band shown in the lower image. The background is brown, and the floats are made with yellow, orange and rust. I must confess that this was not the pattern I originally intended to weave. I inadvertently wound on two extra warps, leaving 13 threads for the floats instead of 11. It would have been difficult to remove them, so I changed the pattern instead. The piece in the upper photo utilizes a fortuitous find for the stripes. Although I had no more space-dyed thread in my stash, as I walked out of the loom room, my eye fell on the bin where I keep my shuttles. One of them contained approximately 100 yards of perle cotton in a colourway called "Mexicali" which I had once used in a tablecloth. I've been trying to figure out how best to use it, and decided to align the colour changes as I'd done with the shaded scarf. However, the Mexicali was a hand-painted thread, so the transitions are more irregular, with the occasional fleck of odd colour appearing out of sequence. Even though the towels are a simple tabby weave, the excitement of "adventure" is held in those space-dyed threads.
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