Random Acts of Color

Actually, this headline is a list of my favorite things. I love weaving with two painted silk warps: When you beam them together and then thread them A-B-A-B, you can weave fabrics with subtle and beautiful color shifts -- an effect I like to call "color play." And then there's Jin: a structure that produces excellent drape in your fabric and allows for expressive patterns as well. AND when you use an extended parallel threading, all you have to do is alter your tieup and treadling to get Echo -- a design technique that works beautifully when you want to combine two painted warps on your loom. In the photo above, the Jin appears in the lower half and the Echo appears in the upper half. To me, they flow together nicely, in part because I used the same treadling as I shifted into Echo. All I did was eliminate the tabby treadling that's needed for Jin and change the tieup. (Easy to do on a table loom, much harder to do on my floor loom, another argument to get

Sometimes when you see something beautiful, you can't get it out of your mind. Which is the case for me with this silk scarf woven by British weaver Sally Weatherill (shown above in detail). I came upon it maybe 3 years ago when I took a workshop with Ann Richards at the Handweavers Studio and Gallery in London. Here's what I gathered from the photo. Simple fact: It's silk, probably 60/2 silk, in double weave. With two different blocks -- one threading for the blue/green horizontal stripes and one threading for the red/purple. A twill threading, probably a 3/1 tieup. Too many shafts for my loom, as I have only 12 (a large Macomber and a Leclerc Voyageur table loom). So, for starters, I can't weave a sample in 3/1 twill blocks. Fine with me; I will weave plain weave instead. Second problem: There is no way I can achieve that small blue/green block in the center of the fabric without adding another block of threading. (That's because the wefts in the red/