Color Chords Make Your Warp Sing!

Pictured above, "Tesselations": an eight-shaft design on a four-color Echo threading. This is one of the samples I'm weaving up for "Echo and Jin: Playing with Color Chords," a workshop I'm teaching at the MAFA (Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association) 2023 conference in June in Millersville, PA.

Weavers will choose their warp colors based on the theories of "color chords" presented by Johannes Itten, author of The Art of Color and The Elements of Color. Many consider him to be the 20th century's master of color theory. 

In addition, The Color Star (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,1985) is a tool for color study based on Itten's theory of color harmony and his 12-point color wheel. The kit (not really a book) includes eight templates that outline a series of chords of his color star. As an example, looking at the photo at the top of this post: The colors of the warp yarns (in 10/2 mercerized cotton) are bright green, orange, burgundy, and royal blue. Together, they form a rectangle, a quadratic chord, on Itten's color star.

The full complement of templates, placed over the color wheel and cycled around the wheel, are as follows:

1) Dyadic chords, the six sets of complementary colors: yellow and violet, yellow/orange and blue/violet, orange and blue, red/orange and blue/green, red and green, and red/violet and yellow-green.

A dyadic chord showing the complementary colors yellow and violet

2) Triadic chords that form either an isosceles triangle or an equilateral triangle on the color wheel. An isosceles triangle will give you four color chords, among them the primary colors of yellow, red, and blue and the secondary colors of orange, violet, and green. 

Triadic chord: an isosceles triangle showing the primary colors

Triadic chords can also be equilateral triangles that yield twelve chords, a.k.a. split complementaries.

Triadic chord showing the split complementaries of yellow, blue/violet, and red/violet. This chord is useful if you're choosing colors for a two-end parallel threading and its accompanying weft -- although if I had a warp of royal blue and magenta I would choose a darker shade of yellow, something more like bronze, because yellow can overwhelm other colors.

3) Quadratic chords that are either a square or a rectangle on the color wheel. (I consider this the barbership quartet of Itten's color theory, which I'm certain would not amuse him.) This is the main part of my subject matter for the MAFA workshop.

Here's an example of a square quadratic chord of warp-color choices, starting at the top left and going clockwise around the wheel: lime green, orange, wine, and royal blue. Unfortunately I didn't line up my yarn cones in that order, but you get the idea....

Here's what those colors look in black and white, defining their relative values:

Predictably, the deep wine color has the darkest value and the orange has the lightest value. Here's an 8-shaft sample woven up with these warp colors, using a turquoise weft.

And here's what this sample looks like in black and white, showing the different values of the color blends:

The darkest values, outlining the motifs in the pattern, are where the turquoise crosses the wine and the royal-blue warps, which stands to reason based on the black-and-white photo of the warp yarns.

Looking again at the sample at the beginning of this post: The warp yarns I used are bright green, orange, burgundy, and royal blue. Together, these colors form a rectangular quadratic chord on Itten's color wheel. 

Here's a black and white photo showing the values of these colors. You'll see that the burgundy on the bottom left of the photo has the darkest value and the orange on the bottom right has the lightest value.

The different values shape the pattern, defining the forms and adding depth. The burgundy adds a shadow, almost an outline, while the orange/yellow appears to sit on top of the sample. 

4) Itten's five-tone chords combine the equilateral and isosceles triangles. These templates are useful when you're creating a four-color parallel threading, for instance, and you're looking for ideas for weft colors as well.

Five-tone color chord of green, yellow/green, red/orange, blue/violet, and blue

5) Finally, there are two different six-tone chords that are revealed by rotating a hexagonal template on the color wheel, the first one giving you two six-tone chords, each consisting of three complementary colors. Both templates in this category use two equilateral triangles: the first one has all colors equidistant from each other, giving you four different chords to choose from, and the second combines two equilaterial triangles to form an irregular hexagon. These two templates are useful in choosing warp and weft colors for Echo woven as doubleweave, where you have four colors in the warp and two colors in the weft. 

Using a hexagonal template for a six-tone chord, I've chosen warp colors that form a trapezoid on the six-tone template -- suggesting, for doubleweave, I should try orange/yellow or blue/green in the weft.

A plug for subjective color choices: Here's a Jin sample where I went rogue and, weaving with the warp colors above, chose hot pink as the weft. Further, I used a wool/stainless-steel yarn in the weft, which gives the fabric pleats (how firm or soft depends on how you shape it, because the stainless steel has memory).

Six-tone chord forming an irregular hexagon (using two equilateral triangles) and showing green, yellow/green, orange, red/orange, violet, blue/violet. These would be great colors to choose for doubleweave, with four colors in the warp and two in the weft.

There's a lot of science involved in how we perceive color and value, obviously. For example, the rods and cones in our eyes allow us to interpret value and color, respectively. Simply put, the rods are more numerous and highly sensitive to light; they work for night vision and peripheral vision. The cones, each devoted to the colors of red, blue, or green, work together to allow our brains to detect the full spectrum. We weave for what we perceive visually in form and color (and substance, which is tactile, but that's another subject).

This is not to say that Itten's chords are hard and fast rules to weave by. (If they were, I would break them a lot.) Instead, I see his theories as objective road maps, a guide when I'm in search of color ideas to achieve interesting color blending for parallel-threaded warps. 

Certainly, I believe that subjective color choices are as important -- perhaps more important, who can say -- for our weaving because, after all, if we don't like the colors we're working with, we probably won't like the end results.

Whatever colors we choose -- objective, subjective, analogous, complementary, harmonious, discordant, even black and white, which aren't colors at all -- it's a joy to learn as much as we can, to sample, to gain insights, to venture outside our comfort zone, and then perhaps to return gladly to our comfort zone, a bit more aware of how best to dwell in it. 

Turquoise. Gets me every time.

Thanks for reading!

 

Can't Make the MAFA Conference? How About 'MAFA Mini'?

Coming this July to a computer near you: MAFA Mini! For those of you who can't make it to the on-site Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association conference in Millersville, PA, this June 22-24, you can Zoom into MAFA Mini. No traveling, no room and board, just lots of learning about fiber art.

I'll be teaching a half-day workshop on how to make Dorset Buttons (see the photo at the top of the poster) -- one of some three dozen online classes in weaving, spinning, dyeing, garment construction, and more. Plus a keynote, lectures, movies, and even yoga. Here's the full schedule. 

Registration begins April 1. For details, click here. Hope to see you online!

 

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

Book Launch!

Weaving Outside the Box: 12 Projects for Creating Dimensional Cloth is now available for purchase! It's been a long road but at last it's ready to launch.

Front and back covers (right and left respectively) for printing

The book is 122 pages long, in full color, with a soft cover and a coil binding so that you can lay it flat as you read and weave. It's also available as an eBook and in hardcover. You'll find all these options on this blog site under the page titled "Publications for Purchase".

Here's a brief description:

"Color and structure are key elements in weaving, of course. But we often overlook the importance of texture. Dimensional fabrics, with their pleats, puffs, and curves, take us 'off the grid', reflecting the organic forms of nature. We can both see and feel the tactile quality of dimensional cloth, which adds much to the beauty of handwoven fabric.

"This book gives you tools to optimize texture in your weaving. Starting with background on the techniques involved, it then offers step-by-step instructions for 12 projects for four to 16-shaft looms: four for beginning weavers, four for intermediate weavers, and four for advanced weavers. As a bonus, there are two patterns that allow you to weave three different projects on a single warp.

"Weaving Outside the Box provides the tips and resources you need to move beyond the two-dimensional plane and rectilinear patterns of warp and weft."

Here are a few of the projects offered.

Among the four projects for four shafts: woven shibori using fulling techniques

Doubleweave layers and ruffles for eight shafts 

using differential-shrinkage techniques

Deflected doubleweave on 16 shafts 

using differential-shrinkage techniques

There are diagrams and even microscopic photos of yarn throughout the book, to help you understand the mechanics behind these designs, all using some combination of active and inactive yarns, structure, and finishing.

I will teach a workshop straight from the book June 11-16 at the Michigan League of Handweavers Conference in Holland, MI. Participants will choose one of the 12 projects from the book and start by weaving up samples so they can learn how to finish their projects to get just the right textured effects.

Dimensional cloth is a specialized area of weaving, one that is sometimes overlooked but has been woven for centuries. My book begins -- and this blog post concludes -- with this quote from Anni Albers, from her definitive book, On Weaving. 

All progress, it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere. We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation -- the reading and writing public of today is enormous. But we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense.

I hope my book inspires weavers to explore all three of the wonderful tools we have in our craft: those of structure, color, and the tactile sense.

Thanks for reading!

Detail of Echo threading in four-color doubleweave on 28 shafts, 

using cotton/stainless-steel yarn for one of the wefts 

to achieve crinkled layers

This Pattern Is More than 400 Years Old... with a Few Changes

 It all starts with a 1626 portrait of John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar and Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, painted by Adam de Colone. 

The painting hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland, where researchers have found that the canvas is in fact a linen tablecloth, a practice that was common at the time. The tablecloth was woven on 14 shafts in this Gebrochene pattern.

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you may recall that I've written about this before -- most recently, on September 18, 2022, in a post that gives you more details on how I altered the pattern but kept the original design line. I learned of it maybe 20 years ago from Marjie Thompson, who calls it "The Earl". 

It was not a stretch to take the threading and create a parallel threading 14 shafts above it, which I did just to see what would happen. I figured it could be woven as Echo or, by adding tabby to the treadling, as Jin (aka Turned Taqueté). The Jin drawdown I designed looks like this.

Here's a detail to give you a better idea of the design.

I really liked the varied geometry of the pattern, so this is what I used for the motifs in the center of the scarf, using two different weft colors, violet and gold. (The gold is in the central section, where the fabric scrunches up into pleats, seen around the neck on the mannikin. That's because the yarn is a combination of silk tram and stainless steel, which has memory.)

The mountain-like motifs at the beginning and end of the scarf -- in purple and orange -- are woven in a doubleweave pattern using what I call a "carved" tieup. (The idea is outlined in Marian Stubenitsky's definitive work, Weaving with Echo and Iris, which provides all number of tieup options for Echo woven as doubleweave.)

When you're weaving four-color doubleweave on an Echo threading, these "carved" variations in the tieup make for lots of color shifts, so that a color first appears on top of the cloth and then shifts to the bottom. This maximizes the potential for color blending.

Adding to the potential for color play: I used a painted warp combined with a black warp for the parallel threading. The technique is quite simple: You wind a two-color warp of natural and black and then paint the entire warp. The natural-colored yarn absorbs the dye and the black does not. 

I love the yarn that I used for the warp, and I doubt I will ever find it again, because I got it at one of those wonderful guild sales. It's a 24/3 unmercerized cotton, so I really didn't have to worry about threads breaking and selvages fraying. For the doubleweave weft, I used 16/2 bamboo in blue, orange, and burgundy, and for the Jin wefts, I used 60/2 silk in deep violet and, as I mentioned, tram-silk/stainless-steel in gold, purchased from Lunatic Fringe, which pleats and bends in the center section.

To me, the motifs look like mountains and the colors remind me of a western sunset. So I've named the piece "Colorado", which means "ruddy" in Spanish. It reminds me of the sunsets over the Sangre de Cristo range, near where my daughter and her family live. The Earl is well traveled indeed.

Thanks for reading!

Anni Albers, "Work with Materials," at the Syracuse University Art Museum

Wall hanging designed by Albers in 1925 and woven in 1983

A few guild friends and I took a road trip last week to see the Syracuse University Art Museum exhibit, "Anni Albers: Work with Materials," curated by Fritz Horstman, education director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibit is up through December 11 and we were thrilled to view some of her designs up close and personal.

The title of the exhibit comes from an essay she wrote, "Work with Materials," in 1937. Here's a quote from that essay:

But if we want to get from materials the sense of directness, the adventure of being close to the stuff the world is made of, we have to go back to the material itself, to its original state, and from here on partake in its stages of change.

Such eloquence and insight! To me, she writes as well as she weaves. In her classic book, On Weaving, she devotes a chapter to "Tactile Sensibility," to explore and emphasize that unique aspect of our craft. 

We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental.

This tactile sense, in addition to the powerful tools of color and structure, is what I love about her work. She explores and exploits the textural aspect of weaving and in so doing appeals to two of our senses -- those of touch and sight. Below, a sample woven on a clear plastic warp with a rough fiber (perhaps jute, I'm not sure) in the weft.

The exhibit included more than 100 objects from the collection, from rugs to prints to textile samples. Small as they were, they revealed her keen mind and powerful design sense. Here's a leno sample that uses a gold metallic yarn in the weft:

Below is a room divider designed by Albers for a textile company in the early 1980s.

By 1968, at the age of 69, she had given up her looms and, as Horstman writes in the exhibit pamphlet, "embarked on a breathtaking decade-plus in which she worked almost exclusively in drawing and printmaking". Her appreciation of tactile sensibility, as she termed it, can be seen in her embossed prints, some of which were included in the exhibit. This one, below, is particularly striking. It's described as "zinc plate embossing on metallic laminate on paper" from 1970. (If you look closely, you can see my reflection as I'm taking the photo, which adds another element to the image.)

Our guide for the exhibit was museum curator Melissa Yuen, who began by showing us a series of flat-woven wall hangings designed (but not woven) by Albers. The piece featured at the beginning of this blog post began with a screenprint on paper from the portfolio "Connections", created by Albers while studying at the Bauhaus in 1925. 

The exhibit gives proof of her strengths in several media and techniques. Below is another wall hanging woven in 1984 according to a design by Albers.

As most weavers know, Anni Albers is one of the great lights in weaving and textile design in the 20th century. What some may not know is that she was one of the first women ever -- and definitely the first textile artist ever -- to have a solo exhibition at MoMA in New York City, which took place in 1949. 

The press release for the exhibit called her "one of the most imaginative and daring of modern weavers in the United States". Her ability to take textiles from the realm of utilitarian craft to abstract art was admired by 20th century artists like Philip Johnson and Jack Lenor Larsen -- as was her versatility. As Fritz Horstman writes in the exhibit brochure, "the exhibition highlights the nimbleness with which Albers moved between mediums, and her fluid transitions between creating artwork and designing more functional objects."

The show also provides evidence of her meticulous study and process, shown here in her diagrams of doubleweave structure. (I had to take the photo at an angle to avoid capturing the shadow of my iPhone.)

It is as if she was perpetually striving to understand "the stuff the world is made of" -- and the results continue to bring joy and inspiration to weavers everywhere. 

"Red Lines on Blue" 1979

Thanks for reading!

Book Launch December 1!

Well, close to December 1, anyway.

A few pointers I want to share with anyone who might be considering writing a book:

1) First and foremost, do not EVER create your index before you've finished the book. If you make this mistake, as I did, understand that you're still revising and re-writing -- which means you'll be trapped in an endless loop of checking and re-checking your index-page numbers. 

2) Do not type on the keyboard while you are eating peanut butter. 

3) Do not ask your significant other to comment on the book. 

4) If you know any dogs, you can ask them to comment. If you know any cats, don't bother.

5) DO ask your smartest friends to proofread the draft. This strengthens friendships and saves you from sending out reams of errata.

6) Somewhere in the middle of the book-writing process, you will feel like you are writing War and Peace. Of course you aren't, but you will feel like that. 

7) It's OK to print it out and throw the pages against the wall. 

8) One serious comment: If you want to write a book, give yourself plenty of time, that is, a reasonable amount of years. And don't tell anyone until it's well under way ;o)