Summer Sungolds

Ideas have so many ways of taking shape. Sometimes it just comes, fully formed and ready. Other times, it starts with a question, “what would happen if…?”. This project took shape in a way that is unusual for me. I have been building a unit on color in weaving for my (coming soon, new and improved!) online platform. I am having a great time putting together resources on many different aspects of color. My degree and early work experience is in Physics/Optics, I have taken many classes in color theory and thought about it in different ways.

I tend to work gut/intuition first and then later break down what is happening so I can talk about it to customers and other weavers. When I teach Color in Weaving, I encourage my students to not only let themselves have strong opinions about what they like and don’t like (and to be open for having it change), but then to find the technical words that help turn those gut feelings into clear and usable concepts.

One of the things that I am exploring is the color wheel and color relationships. I tend to gravitate towards semi-triads, a main color, and then an accent that is 120 degrees apart on the color wheel, as shown below. For this project, I pushed myself to work with complementary colors.

In weaving, working with complementary colors can be tricky. The weft color will always cross the warp color and for complementary colors, this gets muddy fast. For this reason, I chose to start with an eight-shaft double weave because I could maintain the purity of the oranges and blues without them muddying. To weave double, you need to have a sett twice what you would generally use. It’s a whole lot of threads and I needed to get over my fear that this alone would turn weavers away from this project. What I can say is that it is totally worth it and if you have not yet had the pleasure of working with so many threads. My samples were woven with a 928 thread warp (23+” wide). For the pattern, I am reducing this down to 816 (20+”) so that there is enough bleu moyen to weave two squares.

The four and eight-shaft designs are similar, but with four shafts you do not have access to the color purity in some places. I wasn’t sure that it would actually work and give a fabric that lays nicely, but I was pleasantly surprised by my samples.

Double-weave with two layers that change positions is just not possible on a rigid-heddle loom (or if it is, I cannot yet get my mind around it). I considered various techniques for the rigid-heddle project. What I decided, was to use a design strategy that is not easy to get on a shaft loom. I wanted the opportunity for rigid-heddle weavers to not just mimic the shaft loom project, but to create something that is uniquely rigid-heddle. One thing that I love about the rigid-heddle project is the endless possibilities of the placement of the lace blocks, combined with all of the possibilities of color placement. The pattern will have at least two variations, but there is so much space for more exploration.

I hope you enjoy weaving with sungolds!