Monday, April 05, 2010

My First Placemats

Before I move on, I'm going to try to explain one last thing, simply because it was absolutely new to me. We know there are two ways of looking at color and color mixing: light primaries and pigment primaries. We're familiar with pigment primaries because that's how we dye. Light primaries are the hues that printers (and Judith MacKenzie) use. It's also the way our eyes see color. Our eyes contain three receptors for color: red, green and blue. We have the most receptors for red, fewer for green and even fewer for blue.

Say we want to weave a violet cloth for a dress and we have both red and blue silk, which we've decided on because we really really want a violet dress to go with a jacket. We think this blend would make a nice complex color, instead of just buying violet and weaving it as warp and weft. Half of the threads will be the red warp and the other half will be the blue weft. How it will mix and appear to our eyes isn't what we expect. At a distance the cloth will be red violet because we see more red than blue, in spite of the logic of using half of each color (my illustration). If you have a weaving program, try it, then zoom out and see what color you get. It will be red violet. If you change to 3/1 twill and repeat the exercise, you will get your violet. When we weave, we're not mixing colors, all smooshed together. We're doing something more like Seurat and the the pointalists did - dots of color, blended by our eyes. Sorry folks, that's the best I can do.
I finally finished DL Missy's placemat's today. They're hemmed, washed and drying on the balcony. I'll show them when they are dry. Thanks Hilary for being adamant about the temple. It held the warp at the same width throughout and they are all the same size. I'm more pleased than I had expected to be.
The beating on the warp does not bother my studio companion.

8 comments:

Hilary said...

You are welcome, even though your link doesn't work :)
I don't actually use a temple on placemats anymore....but if you aren't used to weaving with rags, it can't hurt.
I do, however, use it without fail on rugs. Always.
And I can't wait to see the placemats.....they look very nice...what I can see.

Theresa said...

Placemats look great and so does you weaving assistant!
I think temples are such great tools. Glad you're feeling the love.

beadlizard said...

I find that bit about receptors to be fascinating. I'm just getting to the point now where I can see both blue and red on the same page. After the radiation I had to scan for one, then scan for the other, as if I were proofreading, and I'll still often miss one of the other when they are "mixed" together.

Charlie is gorgeous and I am a huge fan of temples. A bit of a bother but the result is consistent width, which really mattered after I had years of lop-sided weaving.

bspinner said...

I've sure enjoyed and learned a lot in your last couple of posts!!!
Thanks for sharing!!

Can't wait to see your place mats!

Charlie sure is cute!

Robin said...

I tried several times to sign up for a spinning class with Judith but it was always full. Great recent posts. Love the studio companion!

Benita said...

Do I still see snow on the ground outside that window?

Interesting on the color theory. That cochineal/indigo woven fabric is 50% cochineal and 50% indigo. Maybe it was the way I wove it or how my eyes see it, but I see more of the blue than I do the red, and I see no purple at all, like I thought I would. I'm going to have to study this a bit more.

beadlizard said...

DH: "The smack dab center of the visible light spectrum is the center of the light emitted by our local star, the Sun. Natural selection has selected creatures that see best at the local star's peak emission frequency." He added that red is a lower frequency than blue, thus we need more receptors for red than blue. He really liked the bit about the red and blue threads not yielding the expected mix.

Jodi said...

Charlie looks cute as can be, all curled up!