I love playing with color. It’s like painting but I use different colored threads instead of paints. My shelves are full of cones of 8/2 Tencel from WEBS. The yarns are my paint and the loom is my palette.

Usually I know what the results will be when I grab a couple of colors to put together. Sometimes, I’m surprised though. Two colors that I thought would blend perfectly may look awful together. Two colors I don’t like at all may look lovely as they blend with each other. That is part of the fun, the play, of weaving.

When I paint a sunset, I blend colors from orange through red to purple and then blue. I can do the same with my threads. In the scarf below I blended a brightly dyed, variegated warp–the vertical threads, with a muted variegated weft–the horizontal threads. Then I chose a to weave a pattern that sometimes showed more of the warp and sometimes more of the weft. When you see the scarf from across the room it has subtle vertical stripes from the warp and a circular pattern made by the weaving.

Color Play Scarf–Full Image (Photo by Stacey Evans)

When you come closer you can see more details of the pattern.

Close (Photo by Stacey Evans)

Looking more closely you can begin to see areas of bright threads and areas of muted threads.

Closer (Photo by Stacey Evans)

When you get right up close you begin to see individual threads. Sometime the the muted threads go over 3 or 4 brightly colored threads and sometimes the just go over one thread.

Color Play Scarf–Closest (Photo by Stacey Evans)

So painters aren’t the only ones that get to play around with color. Weavers do too, and boy is it fun.