Yesterday and today have been very restful. I’ve cleaned a little on the house, I’ve read a lot, I’ve knitted on the gradation shawl while listening to A Prairie Home Companion, and I’ve let my thoughts wander as they will and dreamed.
And I have been thinking about weaving. Things have worked against me, time-wise, and I’ve been so busy that a little spinning and knitting is all I have managed to do with fiber. I have three projects I want to do on the looms, but I do not have time to set them up – yet!
While thinking about weaving, I remembered that, while taking the advanced weaving class this past summer, I had a little bit of warp left over from the woven shibori project. The warp was a robin’s egg blue and I had some old, variegated crochet cotton that was left over from a project my grandmother made over 30 years ago. So, I thought I would use up the warp and the remaining cotton thread at the same time. I believe this was woven as a straight twill. Looking at it from straight above, it is a pretty fabric. You can start to see the totally random, but magical thing that happened.
The width of the cloth and the sequence in the variegation created a very cool optical illusion when viewed, especially from the side.
This is something I probably will never be able to repeat. I have showed this little piece of cloth to several people, all who have had a blast looking at it from straight alove, then from the side. In the photograph, the pattern shows up a bit in the straight-on shot, but in real life, it doesn’t at all.
I’d love to show you the gradation shawl, but the sublety of the color shift to date isn’t enough to see in a photo, yet, so I’ll have to make you wait a little longer. I have 10 more balls to knit (these are very small balls of Shetland – about 4 hours of knitting per ball) and the gradation shift should start getting more dramatic.
Also, I started putting together some of my naturally dyed yarns for a sweater vest that I want to knit. I need to do a swatch, then design it on the knitting pattern program I have.
All these wonderful ideas, and so little time…