The Blog

I had the pleasure of indulging in fiber play last weekend at a weaving workshop hosted by our local weaving guild, the Dallas Handweavers and Spinners Guild.   Our workshop leaders, Cathie Chung and Diane Smith from Just Our Yarn guided us in an exciting exploration of variegated color in weave structures.

It’s quite common for weavers to use variegated yarns in their warps, but more often than not they cross that yarn with a solid color to emphasize the variegated.  Crossing a variegated yarn with another can seem, well, risky and over the top.  But Diane & Cathie led us in an exciting exploration of doing that very thing – weaving multi-colored yarns with others and exploring the interactions in different woven structures.

In our round robin workshop, 12 looms were set up with different weave structures and each of the participants wove samples exploring different weft combinations with the warp that was on the loom.  What an adventure we had!  Diane & Cathie generously provided us with lots of their hand dyed yarn to explore with, and boy did we play!

The images here are not examples of our weaving in the workshop, but of their hand painted yarns woven by them into fabulous scarves and samples.  Beautiful, stunning and completely inspiring, their examples were proof positive that variegated color crossing variegated color can produce excitement in hand woven fabrics.

I am so happy and grateful to have made space this last weekend to engage in play and exploration.  This weaver of 41 years has some fun, new ideas percolating in her brain and is itching to start crossing some of those beautiful hand dyed yarns she purchased from these very talented ladies!  Let the weaving begin!