🍁🍇 Autumn Chardonnay Scarves

A bit off season since I'm looking at snow drops and primulas in my garden..... but yes, some weaving inspired by a grape harvest. 

Iridescent Fibers is no longer doing business sadly, but it was the 'dye' arm of the weaving business Loominarias.   The two women, Carrie and Mindy dyed and wove up the most exquisite warps.  They also sold painted warps and I have a few in my yarn closet.   One is called Autumn Chardonnay and was 7 yards long and  208 ends of 8/2 tencel.   Sorry I didn't take a picture of the warp  before I started.

My challenge was to find a draft that looks like leaves for a 16 shaft loom and I found  #79845    at Handweaving.net suited the task.    208 ends doesn't go very far for a scarf width so I decided to pair it up with navy tencel, and then break the painted warp into three sections.   That got tricky and required much patience and nerves of steel !    Then I decided it needed something to catch the eye and added double ends of a pale gold to outline the two outer navy blue sections.    Adding to the centre section was a step too far.    (Unlike some famous people, I know when to stop adding gold embellishments  😉)

 

So this is how my draft looked. The dobby uses the lift plan to activate the solenoids. 

And on the loom you can see both upper and lower patterns here. 

Here's a section where the  purpley blue is transitioning to a bronze gold.  It was fun seeing how the pattern played on the various colour sections  of medium blue, plum, bronze- gold, bronze- brown.  Even a kahki moss green shade. Definitely autumn colours.     

I auditioned other colours to use as weft but nothing did any justice to the painted warp, so I used navy on both scarves.    But !  There was a slight colour variation as I wound the navy blue warp with one dye batch and then used another dye batch as my weft. There is a real difference between the two navy blues and it worked nicely to even show pattern where it was navy on navy.    Stash busting at its finest for that small part cone.  😊

The photos below are of both scarves. They are the same 72 inches x 10 inches finished. Only the placement of dyed warp sections are different. 

As you can see, the loom in behind is warped and under way again.  The new arrangement of a smaller sized loom is working out nicely and I have no regrets.  By the way... I have 25 ends of the painted warp left over and so watch for the ends to be featured in some project to come. Meanwhile I'm thinking of how to show them off to their best advantage....   

So we do have spring flowers starting to appear here and we have noticed small flocks of little birds starting to appear again.   We hardly got any snow this winter so we will no doubt be under water restrictions  right away.     Spring and Fall are my favourite seasons now as the other two are too extreme. 

🍂🍇