Sampling

Alice,
Since the weekend has passed I have made significant progress on the 'It's spring Alice!' warp, and begun sampling. I have put 9 yards of warp on the loom with plans to be able to use at least 1 yard for sampling. Yesterday I tried several of the wefts that I had planned, cut it off, wet-finished my piece and looked, evaluated, and looked some more. I asked DH for his critique. I phoned Mary U and asked for hers. We looked at the sample piece in different lights, close-up and at a distance, hanging and flat. I think in the end we all agreed on the same one for the proposed jacket (I badly need something that says 'Spring' and yet is still warm enough when Spring is slow to come).

However, Mary and I also thought that the bit with a black cotton warp was also interesting and potentially stunning as a fabric. I had only used the black to even up the warp bundles that were tied on, and to help me see if there were any threading mistakes. Ah, happenstance! The black weft has the potential to become a shawl with a different sett, and we thought that it would kick it up a notch to have a beautiful, heavier weft accent throughout.

So! as soon as I have put the linen warp on Little Alice (the Macomber) I will try more samples. I'm going to use a very nice black wool that was in the stash (from your stash, Alice, and I will try a dark green wool, too.) Before I do that, though, there are a couple of areas that need to have the warp threads mixed up a bit more, and now is the time to fix that. This fabric measures 24 inches wide after shrinkage, and there would be only one way to lay pattern pieces out, so I don't need any stray stripe-y looking areas lurking there. Here is the full sample piece...with a photo of the Chanel jacket that was the inspiration.