Planning

Several weeks ago I promised to show you the phases of designing a woven project.

I had a lot of life intervene in the ensuing weeks, but now I'm rocking and rolling on that project.

I love it when someone gives me a snippet, or an idea, or a picture and says "use that as your inspiration."  I think and I plan, and I think some more.  Then I start coloring and seeing what the colors look like next to each other.

Normally I would then go to my yarn (my pallette) and start pulling snips and laying them next to each other, but I had to sell most of my cotton when I moved out here so I'm starting from scratch, and images on a computer screen.

But I think I did pretty good with this one...here are the yarns laid out on my table.  I've left them there all this time, all this planning and thinking and planning some more and I've gotten an idea and I've been running with it and I can't wait to show you the next step...tomorrow or so...

And actually I ended up removing the darkest blue and using the lighter blue as my "outside blue" and putting an even paler shade of blue in the middle.  I also want to point out that the two center cones are indeed different colors--ecru and pale grey.

After loads of thinking and redesigning and thinking and coloring, it hit me one day to attempt a gradient, so that's what I'm doing.  At this point I had a little math to do to figure out how to make it go from orange to blue with some mixings in the middle to make it look cool and then I had to figure out how I wanted to thread the loom because that will matter in the end.

I've decided on a point twill pattern--this will give the regular shaped V's you see in a lot of my work.  While the inspirational picture wasn't "sunset in the mountains" I've been seeing a lot of sunsets in the mountains, and heck if it doesn't have all these gorgeous colors.  So, I'm weaving lots of little mountains on these towels.

Next step is winding the warp, which I actually started yesterday.  I'll let you see a picture of my winding station that I've set up...even I'm impressed at the ingenuity that necessity brings about.