Saturday, February 01, 2014

A Little Bit of Lots of Stuff

The above photo is of a baby blanket woven for some friends.  The warp is a burgundy color, the pattern weft is a light pink (both in 10/2 cotton) and the tabby weft is a wool/angora/nylon yarn that I recycled from a sweater dress and is dark purple.  I love the hand of the blanket!  The recycled yarn softens the hand of the crackle weave significantly!

Check out these little samples:

 They are about an inch and a half tall by one inch wide.  I'm doing a custom piece for an individual and we needed to determine color order for the stripes.  I had wound a larger piece before I realized that maybe the colors should be in a different order and started winding the tiny tests.  Well, after the fifth tiny test I had found a combo that I liked and paused for a moment to run some calculations.  With five colors the number of color combinations are 5! (five-factorial), which equals 120 possibilities!  Half of them are reflections of each other--ABCDE is the same as EDCBA, which brings the number down to 60 possibilities.  Gasp!  Still to many to manage!  My fiber enabler came to the rescue and did some programing so that I could see all sixty color combinations.  Whew!  What a challenge!

Here's another little project on my first structo loom:
 It's a plaid fabric for Conner Prairie.  They are working on recreating a piece and this is one of many plaids that will become a part of the finished project.
This is how it looked going on the loom:



And, just because I'm excited about it, check out the new little structo that has come to stay at my house!  This is not the one being used to weave the plaid, it's another one.  :)  I keep hoping that one day I will find a way to teach weaving, so I am starting a collection of these little looms.