Second draft after messing around with progressions – flames
Third draft, after deciding the mercerized cotton needed more interlacements
Fourth draft
Sometimes people ask where I get my ideas from.
Well, that depends (you’re surprised, aren’t you?)
Right now I’m focused on using up what stash I have, so I’m looking at the yarns I have and working with them to make something they will be suitable for. Lately it’s been never ending tea towels.
As I was finishing up working with the 2/16 cotton, I dug out the mercerized cotton stash – three boxes of it. As I sorted the colours, I grouped them into potential warp combinations. There was not enough of any one colour to make a warp (sectional beaming) but I rarely do a one colour warp these days. (The all natural 2/16 was an exception because I needed something to use up the dribs and drabs of the dyed yarns and natural was cheap and easy.)
What I had when I finished sorting was four bins – one with medium to burgundy red, one with burgundy red to dark purple, one with an ‘odd’ blue – dark with greenish undertones – one with ‘neutral’ things like beige, grey, sage green.
Then I found a large cone of copper – about a kilo – and decided that it could be used as weft on the med-dark burgundy and began thinking about flames. And how appropriate that vision was, considering how the world seems to be on fire right now – Spain, Portugal, large parts of the continent of Africa, the US and Canada. I think Australia isn’t burning right now just because it’s winter there.
Then I thought about climate change in general – flooding, drought, other climate disasters.
As I looked at the bins of yarn, I thought I could use climate change as a theme with flames as the first.
The neutrals will be drought. The darker reds/purples will be heat. The ‘odd’ blue will be flood.
Given how fine 2/20 mercerized cotton is, and how slippery, and the colours I will be working with, each warp will be some iteration of a fairly simple progression. For ‘flood’ I’m thinking of something more undulating, so that will likely be the last one I do. But, and there’s the thing, after beaming the first warp with the med-dark reds? There is still a tonne of yarn left. So this series may extend further. As each warp gets woven, I look at it on the loom, I look at it from beside the loom, I check underneath, because the cloth looks slightly different on each side, I think about the colours (both warp and weft) I want to use, and I think about the theme.
And I make changes.
Sometimes tiny ones, like between draft 2 and 3, sometimes slightly bigger ones, like draft 3 to 4.
Most times I don’t have any such theme I’m working with, other than ‘will this cloth do the task it is intended for? Does it look pretty (to me)?’
But the world is too much with me these days, and here I am…