I have registered interest to exhibit work at the “Brilliant, vibrant women” exhibition at the Eastside Gallery in Linwood with a turned twill silk scarf with colour gradients in both the warp and the weft that I have called “Zing!!”. I created the pattern based on one I found in Tien Chiu’s class “Gorgeous gradients deep dive”. I worked on the pattern in WeaveIT software.

The warp will be 20/2 mulberry silk in cream, yellow, orange, red & magenta.
The weft 20/2 mulberry silk in cream, yellow, green, blue & purple.

Weave structure: 8-shaft turned twill
Warp length: 3.5m (1 scarf + sample)
Finished dimensions: ~35cm x 1.8m
Total number of ends: 427 (424 in pattern + 1 for symmetry and a float on each side)
Width in reed: 43cm
EPI & PPI: 25
Reed: 10dpi, sleyed 2,3 ends per dent
Raddle: 5 ends/slot

I began by winding a skein of each colour into a ball. The warp was then wound using the colour sequence from the .wif file. This involved a lot of cutting and tying because of all the colour changes. Next time I weave a colour gradient, I need to try either parking a colour for use later (see Tien Chiu’s class for details) or winding separate warps for the appropriate number of ends of each colour (an upcoming lesson by Jane Stafford’s Online Guild).

The loom was dressed from back-to-front as normal using 2 repeats of the threading sequence from the .wif file (a single iteration is pictured below).

Once the warp was tied to the front apron rod, I wove the header rows and hemstitched with the cream 20/2 mulberry silk.

I am now ready to weave. The warp looks great – fantastic colours!