Pre-weaving My Mistakes

Okay, so what’s next? I’ve got my black fabric base started, but I’m back to the question. How can I make my waterfall and river with some perspective?

I’m going to go back to my sampler for what I hope will be my answer….

If you look very carefully, there are just a few rows that I was playing with a clasped weft for the outline picks. See – right there….

I envision my wonderful bamboo yarn being the outline weft, which will look like water tumbling over rocks, etc. And as the weaving progresses, I can bring the sparkly clasped bamboo narrower. That’s a new trick (for this pony anyway). I hope to clasp the weft on each side, so that the river truly narrows as it approaches the dam waterfall. I’m sure someone somewhere has done this. After all the slinky weaving that I have already tried and abandoned, I can’t imagine that a doubly-clasped weft is going to give me trouble. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know.

I’ll have to decide whether I want to introduce more color in the block A and block B wefts. This puts me right back to one of the biggest struggles for me – color selections. Do I want to keep it monotone (aka black split-complementary)? I’m thinking yes, I want to stay with just the fantabulous bamboo yarn. A few of the yarns I used in the sampler gave it a strong green undertone. Nothing against green, but then I have to be careful what I put near it.

My lesson from this: sampling pays off. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve referred back to it several times. You get the drift that I’m not a big fan of sampling? I always want to get right into the project! But more than that, I want to be happy with the final product. Maybe I’ll like sampling better if I change the way I think of it. How’s this sound for a new perspective: the key to a successful project – pre-weave all your mistakes into a sampler. All the bad color combinations, all the wrong size blocks, all the threading tweaks and treadling design flaws can be worked right into the sampler. If I make all the imaginable mistakes up front, I won’t make any while I weaving. Ha!