Colour

One of my biggest challenges when it comes to weaving is choosing colours. I know the basics of colour theory. Ok, I know about the colour wheel and how to mix the primaries to create the secondary colours. I even know a tiny bit about putting colours together. Weaving however, adds a whole new element. If my warp is red and my weft is blue, those colours will blend when my eyes see them and it will look purple. My two colours give birth to a new colour. And I’m not always sure how it will look , so I play it safe: I use the same colour way for both warp and weft or pick a variegated  and pair it with a solid colour that is in the variegated or I stick to neutrals.

I recently tried to be a little more adventurous. Rowan Yarns has a lovely yarn called Felted Tweed. The green, yellow and orange were calling my name. I think it had to do with it being the height of fall and all the trees were yellow and green and orange. If nature can pull off those colours, so can I !

At the same time as getting adventurous with colour I decided to figure out how to use  two heddles to  create double weave only in certain parts of my weaving. And how to bring different colours to the front.  And use an extra pick up stick in double weave to add more pattern. Have I told you I never start easy?

I ended up with fabric that holds together, so I guess that is some success. The rest really didn’t come together well. I'll stick to the colour issue for this post. A few things happened.

First, I used tweed.  When a tweed yarn is spun, little bits of other fibers in contrasting colours are added to the wool. So my colours weren’t pure colours, they all had flecks of other colours mixed in. I experienced first hand what it means to have “muddy" colours.  

Then, some of my patches have all three colours together. It’s not that using three colours  is a bad thing,  but add the tweed and it really doesn’t work so well. On the orange,  the strongest colour, it works pretty well but using only 1 colour, or 2, works even better.

Proportions are important too. Using 3 colours in equal amounts might be ok for some projects, but using 1 colour sparingly can change ok to fabulous. Note in the first picture the primary colour is  green, then yellow, and finally just a little bit of orange.  All the colours look more distinct and the orange draws the eye. But use mostly orange (second pic) and it over powers the other colours.

I know that sampling is (part of)  the solution to my problem but we all know how I feel about sampling! (Actually, this was a sample! I had no plans for the finished product and was ok if it didn’t work!)

Knowledge is also power. I just received a book about colour. It's not specifically a weaving book, but it tells me about colour, colour theory, gives numerous colour combinations and gives proportions as well as grouping them into families (soothing, neutral, bold, dynamic, powerful etc.). I'm looking forward to experimenting with new colour combinations!