P2P2: dyeing to move on

I spent last week in Adelaide on a training course for work. I was lucky, I flew over there just before the ash cloud descended and travelled nack 24 hours after Tasmanian airports were re-opened. I spent part of the weekend before I went weaving, and took my second sample off the loom just hours before I was due to leave for the airport. I took it with me, unfinished, to have a look at and think about while I was away. More on that another time.

I also thought more about the photos. I realised that no matter how often I looked at the set, the picture of the heron was the central point of focus for my mind. So I started digging through my stash of handpun silk cap to see what I had that worked with it. I have a lot of handspun silk cap. I bought a kilogram of silk caps a few years ago and have been enjoying playing with dyeing them ever since. The problem was, I was now down to precisely one undyed silk cap - and now there are none!

If you click on the image above to biggify it, you can see that I've been matching colours to the photo. Those on bobbins I already had. The skein of silk and the silk cap have been dyed over the last couple of days.

The skein started out cornflower blue, before I started to fiddle with overdyeing. I tried to match the colours and in a way also textures in the grass. The silk cap, below, was dyed randomly to match not only the salmon-lavender colours in the reeds but also the purplishness of the tree in the background.

I plan to split out the darker and lighter portions as I spin and spin them seperately.

One striking thing about this photo is that the elements pull in towards the centre from either side. That screams clasped weft to me. But having the colour elements in the weft - particularly varigated ones - will give a fabric with the predominant elements horizontal, whereas this photo has a strong vertical element with all the tall grasses and reeds - not to forget the upright heron!

I have a plan for that, but more on that later.