Not-So-Random Acts of Color: Johannes Itten's Color Chords

 

In 1921, Johannes Itten -- a painter and teacher at Germany's famed Bauhaus School -- published The Color Star, a small book featuring a 12-point color wheel that's been valued by artists ever since. The book included eight templates that one can place over the color star, displaying a variety of what he termed "color chords". Every point on the star represents one color in the spectrum, and every color is shown in a range beginning with the lightest tints (white added) and moving outward to the three darkest shades (black added). 

The pure colors are in the center band of the circle.

Itten's Color Star

Itten's first template shows you the two-tone Dyadic Chords, giving you all of the complementary colors: yellow/violet, yellow-orange/blue-violet, orange/blue, red-orange/blue-green, red/green, and red-violet/yellow-green. 

His Triadic Chords can be created using either isosceles or equilateral triangles, as seen here with the template for an equilateral triangle (and some yarn possibilities).

Without going into more detail, I'll get to the point: I use these chords to choose warp colors for extended-parallel threadings, which use two, or three, or four colors in the warp. The results can create beautiful iridescent shifts in the fabric. Like this sample, using a four-color parallel threading on eight shafts with a turquoise weft.

Or this variation, with a burgundy weft:

Or this, with a violet weft:

For the warp colors, I used the one of the templates for Itten's Quadratic Chord, which can be a square or a rectangle. In this case, I chose the square and based on this I went with saturated colors. Go big and bold or go home, right?

The samples will be used in a workshop I'm presenting at MAFA this June: "Echo and Jin: Playing with Color Chords". My aim is to familiarize weavers with Itten's objective theories about color chords and then let them choose their own colors within that framework.

Everyone's rods and cones are different, we know. Not everybody likes olive in their warp, correct? These subjective decisions are what makes our creations unique.

Here's the warp I'm threading right now, using a Quadratic Color Chord that's a rectangle rather than a square. 

It will be used with a 12-shaft pattern -- and I really love these colors. Consider that you're looking at two sets of complements: blue/orange and green/red (except in this case the red tilts more toward a berry color). 

My next plan is to try a trapezoid as a color chord. Itten doesn't offer that in his templates, but I think it's worth trying. Mother Nature seems to range freely and quite joyously around the spectrum, so why can't we?

This discussion doesn't venture into the importance of value. At this point, without having focused on this topic, my thinking is that it's best to avoid extreme differences in value in a parallel-threaded warp, particularly in a four-end parallel-threaded warp. Some differences in value are OK, but I try to avoid colors like navy, deep purple, forest green, and the like -- or, on the other side of the value scale, yellow, beige, pale pink, baby blue, silver, that range of hues. 

Why? Because the warp color with a very dark value may tamp down the effect of iridescence, while a warp color with a very light value may overwhelm the other colors -- sort of like a singer in a quartet who is louder than anyone else. 

Looking at values, here's what I chose for my first warp (the one I wove on eight shafts, samples shown at the beginning of this post).

The red on the far left is darker in value than I'd like -- and surprisingly, it's darker in value than the blue on the far right -- but I went with it anyway because that's what I had in my stash. (That can overrule a lot of rules.) Still, if you look back at the samples at the top of this post, it seems to work well.

Another question: What do we choose for weft? Sampling is so important for this, of course. Typically, I start any project by winding a warp that is about a yard longer than I need for the finished piece and then I use the first yard or so to experiment with different weft colors.

When I'm weaving Echo or Jin on a four-end parallel, I tend to use muted colors in mid-range values, such as bronze, violet, teal, olive, mustard, terra cotta, even gray. Also, as a rule of thumb, you'll want to use colors that do not appear in the warp -- that is, colors that are found in between the colors you've chosen from the color wheel. 

Then again, for every rule there seems to be an exception, as you see in the fourth photo down from the start of this blog post. For that sample, I used a bright turquoise weft. I love turquoise and find that I often default to that color, for warp or weft.

Itten would say this is a subjective choice, of course. 

Thanks for reading!

Doubleweave on 16 shafts 

using a four-end extended-parallel threading

Collapse Designs on 4 Shafts: a Sneak Peek at Upcoming Workshops

There are SO MANY ways to produce textured fabrics! And it's relatively easy to weave complex-looking fabric on just 4 shafts. Which is the subject of a workshop I will be teaching this summer at the MAFA (Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association) conference at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

The sample pictured above, for example, looked like this before washing and fulling.

The warp is 20/2 pearl cotton and the weft is 18/2 merino. You'll see that the weft floats in alternating blocks on the top of the fabric, but not on the back. After washing and agitating in hot, soapy water, the weft floats will full and shrink, pulling in the cotton warps in a checkerboard pattern. The image at the top of the page shows what was the back of the fabric on the loom -- which is the far more interesting surface due to the checkerboard pattern.

Here is the draft.

I did 3 other samples on this 20/2 cotton warp. Here are the images of the samples after washing.

20/2 pearl cotton alternating with 18/2 merino weft stripes in plain weave

18/2 merino weft floats alternating with 20/2 pearl cotton weft in plain weave 

Same as above sample, but with merino weft floats on one side only

I particularly love the texture of the middle sample, as it looks the same on both sides and it shrank up the most (width-wise) of all the samples -- making it spongy and lofty. I think it would work well as a lightweight jacket or coat fabric. With lots of color in the warp and weft, of course.

Here are some more photos of samples I've woven up and washed in preparation for this workshop.

Deflected Double Weave

Double Weave (two layers woven simultaneously)

Differential shrinkage using merino and superwash wool

Collapse fabric using a wool/latex weft (warp is on the horizontal)

 Fulling with woven-shibori technique

 Weft floats fulled and cut to create an eyelash effect

So many techniques, so much to learn. I will be teaching another collapse-cloth workshop -- this time on both 4 and 8 shafts -- at the Hartford Artisans Weaving Center at the end of the summer. In September, I'll give a Power Point presentation on the subject to the New York Guild of Handweavers -- hopefully with lots of new photos to show from the summer workshops.

Painting Two Warps for Turned Overshot: Cat's Paws and Snail's Trails

We all love color, true? And weaving offers so many techniques -- polychrome, color and weave, supplemental warps and wefts, painted yarns, variegated yarns -- that allow us to play to our heart's content.

I have been experimenting for a number of years now, using two hand-painted warps in complementing color palettes in warp-dominant weaving structures, combing them into one warp to achieve maximum color play. At least that's one slightly complicated way to describe it. (A plug here: I hope to teach a course on this technique this July at the MAFA Conference at Millersville University: "Paint 2 Beam 1." We will find out on Monday, May 18, as to which courses will run.)

Among the structures that lend themselves to this technique: Turned Taquete, Echo Weave, double weave, twill blocks (I like to alternate stripes of 1/3 and 3/1 twill) and Turned Overshot -- which is the sample pictured above.

Cat's Paws and Snail's Trails is a classic 4-harness pattern. When you turn the draft, you're weaving on 6 harnesses because you have a tabby ground cloth. The advantage using my painted-warp technique is that your pattern warp is painted in one set of colors (in this case I used turquoise, purple, teal, and blue) while the ground warp is painted in another palette (coral, orange, gold, yellow, and red). It's a one-shuttle weave, and my weft yarn matched the gold in the warp.

Just coming out of a linen workshop with Kati Reeder Meek, I chose to work with linen. My ground warp is 50/2 half-bleached linen and the pattern warp is 14/1 in natural. Both yarns are wet spun. My weft, like the ground warp, was 50/2 linen.

Here are two more views. The sample is long and narrow, about 4 inches wide, because the sett was about 60 ends per inch. Not hard, really, and well worth the effort!