Serendipity

After the first couple of forays into weaving on my rigid heddle I started planning all sorts of projects. I wanted to do a rug with some handspun, but didn't have quite enough to get started, so I had to wait for more fiber to spin before I'd able to get started on weaving. I also had dyed some wool with food coloring because as a new weaver I felt I needed to do a color gamp. And what's better than weaving a color gamp? Weaving it with your own hand-dyed rainbow of yarn of course.

But unfortunately, as soon as I finally had all these lovely skeins ready to weave I realized I didn't have the right size heddle. So this project was also on hold until I received that package. Long story short every project I wanted to do had some element to it that I was waiting on before I could start. So my loom stood empty and that's no good.

I felt desperate to weave so I raided my stash. And came up with a hand-dyed skein of 75% merino 25% silk dk weight yarn from Sheep and Honey. The colorway is called fall madness. The interesting thing about this yarn is I bought a sweater's worth some months ago and almost instantly regretted it because while the colors are great in the hank, it lost its subtlety when knitted up.

Instead of all the colors softly blending into the next I got a jumble of colors that was just way too loud for me to ever actually wear. So I knitted a sweater for my little girl who has no fear of "loud" clothing and added the leftovers to the stash.

I figured weaving this yarn would allow me to avoid that jumbly-ness and it was pretty much the only yarn I had to work with anyway since my stash was actually pretty small and Covid-19 meant I wasn't doing any unnecessary shopping trips. I wanted to weave now! And if I couldn't weave now at least I could get some warping done so I could weave soon.

Now I thought I could maintain the integrity of the colorway by using this yarn for warp and planning the length of the warp in such a way as to get all the colors to pool together. I had seen this technique described in Syne Mitchell's book, Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom. Without going back into the book to see how she had done it I set up my loom and direct warping peg, taking over the whole kitchen once again. Instead of measuring the color repeats and choosing the length of my warp accordingly I guesstimated and moved my peg back and forth until it looked like the colors were pooling together across the two ends of my first loop. I checked the yardage and, doing the math, decided I had more than enough to warp my whole 24" loom. One loop was not sufficient for predicting how the colors would behave however and over the course of the warping process they started to drift. Then I discovered I had done my math all wrong as I ran out of yarn with half of the loom still to go. I went to bed completely frustrated. Not only did I not get to weave that night I didn't even succeed in getting the loom ready for me to weave the next day even though I had spent a couple of hours on it.

Well the next day I found another small ball of leftover "fall madness" and basically said "screw it, I don't even know what this fabric is going to be, I just need to get weaving!" and I warped up the next section without worrying about color pooling. Since the color pooling hadn't worked out perfectly anyway I didn't think it would make a big difference. Then I ran out of yarn again and so I pulled out some handspun (not mine) that I bought last year on my family's trip to Washington and finally finished warping. On to weaving!

Here's where I could actually see just how big of a difference the color-pooling made. See the jumbled up colors in the middle-right section? They're perfectly fine I suppose, nothing wrong with them if you like that kind of busyness but look how beautifully the colors play in the pooled section on the left! Like I said the colors started to drift but they did so in such a way that every other end was the same which kept it from becoming the riot of color that you see in the unpooled section.

Anyway, I found it to be a fun study of color as I wove using different stash yarns and saw how they played with my uniquely colorful warp and it did give me the weaving fix I needed.

But I have to tell you I was worried how my method of doing "a little bit of this a little bit of that" with the weft would play out on the whole piece. After all, in knitting, you can take a look at the whole project as you go but in weaving most of it is wound up on the front beam and you can only see a small section of it at a time. I tried to keep some kind of balance throughout as I cycled through the different wefts I had chosen from my stash and felt it would probably turn out ok but I really was not at all prepared for that moment of rolling the fabric off the loom. I gasped! It was so much more beautiful than I could have imagined

I mean just Look!

I love the iridescent quality it has, I love the subtle gradation of colors, I don't even mind the two contrasting sections from running out of warp. Of course, it is far from perfect, my selvages are ghastly, I have yet to decide what to do with the fabric as its dimensions fail to lend it toward anything in particular and the warp floats I experimented with in some sections make it a less than sturdy fabric but I'm not sure it matters. This project made me fall in love with weaving. That moment of rolling the completed fabric off the front beam to see for the first time what I had created -- it was magical. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

So here are my main takeaways from this experiment: One, warping should never be treated as a necessary evil to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. If I'm going to be successful as a weaver I have to learn to love the warping process itself. Two: brilliant, serendipitous things happen when you play around with color, things that you cannot achieve through careful planning.

Now I know last time I promised I would talk about a hand-painted warp. Unfortunately, I only have time for a brief mention here at the end. But I have my reasons for spending so much time writing about this and leaving the handpainted warp mostly for another post and here it is: this lovely, glorious fabric is the reason I decided I had to try out hand-painting a warp, it's the reason I used some of my stimulus check to buy some dyes and equipment and some yarn just so I could try it out. Because while the process of warping and trying to get colors in the hand-dyed skein to pool was super frustrating, the end result was so stunning I just had to try it out again. And I figure if the yarn is already wound into a warp before I ever put the color on then I could skip the whole process of trying to make the warp just the right length to get the colors to match up. Brilliant, right? But first I had to get the necessary equipment and that meant I was left waiting yet again. C'est la vie.

Next time I'll get into the hand-painted warp itself I swear!