Now that I am beginning to get my sea legs on double weave for my Jacquard loom I have been experimenting with color. There are a million weave structures but I have chosen twill as my launching point. I like the texture made by the twill lines – they remind me of hatching on black and white sketching.
One of my goals is to combine my watercolor with weaving. The painting above is a quick sketch from a photo of my friend’s grand daughter.
I am using ADACAD for all of my drafting work and Photoshop for all of my imaging editing. I’ve made some Photoshop actions to simplify some repetitive tasks like adding white for the unused heddles, shifting the pattern, saving in the right file format, etc. Handy. Another great feature of ADACAD is the ability to swap out component drafts while retaining other design decisions. When I tire of twill I can easily explore other structures. More on that at another time.
Here is a sample of twill using black or white warp with the front or back color. I am looking for a clear gradient. I found that blending 2 colors as pairs (2 picks blue, 2 picks orange which shows a blue and an orange alternating on top) gave more of the granular wash appearance that I enjoy in watercolor than a single color appearing on the front (1 pick blue, 1 pick orange).
The color names are not official, just the colors that I relate to from my watercolor palette. I think Cobalt is the right yarn name though…
Here are the drafts for the first samples:
There is a really big jump between the black warps showing and the white warps showing – not really a surprise. I am going to do a test to see if alternating black and white on top in the warp can create a better mid range. I’ll leave that for the next post.
I’ve indexed a photo of the painting and am now trying to match color/value on the sample. The goal is to reduce the number of weft colors, ideally keeping them to 2 and tweaking the drafts to show either a blend of the 2 colors or a single color on top at the right value and color intensity. I think this will depend upon how well 2 picks on the back can nestle behind 2 picks of another color on the front. This initial set of tests look like 4 colors so far. We will see what happens next with a mixed warp and nestled picks.
All of this yarn is cottolin from Venne. The double weave warp is set at 45 ends per inch (22.5 for each layer). I am going to be sad when this warp comes to an end. So fun.