More Colours in Twill

The last few towels flew off the loom, and I pretty much flew by the seat of my pants in deciding what colour combinations to use.

For the fifth towel, I went with one in kelly green and magenta, which is definitely one of my favourites of the whole bunch.  It's really bright and I like how the colours work together.

With the sixth towel, I realized that I was running out of towels to weave, and I wanted to get back to orange, since I had really liked the previous orange one a lot.  Since I had done it with magenta already (and didn't want to do anything too tonally similar like the dark red) I matched it up with the dark purple.  I like this one a lot too.

The other light colour I'd only used once was yellow, and while I toyed with using it against the kelly green or against the orange, I was afraid that they just wouldn't have enough contrast to be visually interesting.  I went with magenta instead, since both of my previous magenta towels turned out so pretty.  In the end, I think it's a bit too similar to the yellow/red combo (until you see them next to each other they look pretty close) but je ne regrette rien.

I had to get them off the loom quickly because I have a time-sensitive project to weave - Handwoven magazine is taking submissions for designs for a new e-book and I wanted to weave up a sample to submit it - but once that is all done, I will hem and wash and iron these towels and show them off as a set.

Can't Stop Won't Stop

After doing the last colourful set of towels, I really wanted to do another set in some different colours, and keep playing with the concept.  I thought it would be fun to do a set in Mardi Gras colours (purple, green, and gold) so chose a couple of shades of each and used a weaving program on the computer to come up with a point twill stripe design that I liked.  In the end, I also added a deep red to help balance out the darks and lights in the design.

Once I had the green summer and winter towels off the loom, I couldn't wait to get started on this warp, since it's so colourful and fun (and the weaving is comparatively mindless.)

My initial plan was to do seven towels in total, with each of the first three towels in one of the three colour groups.  I started with one in Kelly Green and Pistachio.  You can see it at the bottom of the photo.  The two colours are both relatively light, and there wasn't a lot of contrast between the stripes.  It made an overall wash of green over the colours of the whole warp, which I didn't hate, but it wasn't what I was imagining.  I decided to nix my initial plan to follow up with a purple/magenta striped towel and an orange/yellow towel.  I wanted more contrast between the stripes to make the towels more visually interesting.

With that in mind, I did the second towel in orange and magenta stripes.  This one had a lot of visual pop and I was really happy with how it turned out.  The colours have a good amount of contrast and they give the warp colours a lot of variation.  I like how the twill diamonds alternate between columns when the weft stripes alternate between dark/light.  In the green towel, they only show up distinctly in the dark warp stripes, since the greens are both so light.

For the third towel, I stayed with high contrast and did a towel with stripes in Pistachio green and a deep Purple.  Again, I think the contrast makes it much better and I like the green better here.

I went with yellow and deep red stripes for the fourth towel.  It is only subtly different than the previous one, but definitely still pleasing to the eye.

That passes the halfway point for the towels, since there should be a total of seven.  I have a couple of colour combinations planned for the last ones, but to be honest, I'm actually reconsidering doing the yellow/orange combo... and even the purple/magenta...  what do you think?

Tupelo Cowl

I got some sock yarn with the Cookie A Sock Club a couple of years ago, and started to knit up a pair of socks with it, but it just didn't feel right to me.  The yarn is a mix of wool and silk, and it didn't have a lot of stretch but it did have a lot of shine.  It also was a bit thick for my sock preference, these days, and ultimately I frogged the sock and set the yarn on the shelf.  I thought I might knit it up into a little one-skein shawl, but the yardage was a bit short for even doing that (and I hate running out of yarn before the end of a project) so it sat and sat, waiting for me to have an epiphany.

Enter the cowl.

I don't normally knit cowls, either (since I don't normally wear them) but something about this one spoke to me, especially once I came up with the idea of doing it in the lovely pink silky yarn that had been waiting and waiting for inspiration.  I decided that a little shiny cowl would be the perfect thing for those cool spring mornings when you don't want to dress up too warmly for your walk to work (since the afternoon walk home in springtime is much much warmer and you have to haul all those wintery things back home with you when you just yearn to walk unencumbered through the warm sunny air.)

So I spent a few days knitting up a cute little cowl and I've been wearing it off and on.  The variegations in the yarn somehow ended up as stripes, but I'm ok with that.  It's still silky and shiny and drapey and warm.  I may have even converted myself to a cowl person.