Sunrise Sunset complete

I finished all 3 pieces on my handpainted Sunrise-Sunset warp. I’m happy with all three. Remember, this is an oddly-sized 8/3 mercerized cotton warp. There’s a bit of 5/2 cotton in between the handpainted stripes – red, yellow, red.

I’d originally sett the warp at 16EPI, but after weave a few inches and thinking about my recent experience with the silk, I unwove and resleyed to 18 EPI. First up I used a dusty rose 8/2 tencel weft, in plain weave.

The weft toned the warp down – in a good way.

Even though the cotton is semi-thick for this sett, with the tencel it retains some drape.

I auditioned various wefts…16/2 navy cotton, 8/2 lavender tencel, 10/2 sienna cotton, and others I don’t even remember. But decided I wanted to emphasize the orange, so went with 2 strands of fine mercerized cotton. I had a red-orange in 16/2 and a medium orange in 20/2. I wound them on the bobbin together and set off weaving. This time I chose a 3/1 twill to enhance the drape of the fabric.

Again, remembering my recent experience with the silk, I decided to stick with the same treadling throughout the length, no alternating faces on this. So here you can see how one side punches up the purples and blues, while the other really focuses on the oranges and reds.

The twill did, indeed, enhance the drape of this piece.

Now, I had originally planned on making a long vest with the third piece, but that was before I had to omit a bunch of planned warp. So plan #2 was a mobius wrap. For this one I wanted to punch up the red, so I used 1 strand of 16/2 red mercerized cotton and 1 strand of that 20/2 red-orange. I wove this one in plain weave as well, but felt like I wasn’t getting decent consistency in the fabric, so beat it a bit harder than the first piece.

I hoped I had enough length to get a bag or pillow out of it, too. But when I still had at least 20″ of apparently weave-able warp length left things started getting really wonky. I’m not generally of a mind to fiddle endlessly with the end of my warp, even if I really like it as I do this one, so I cut it off.

After wet finishing I pinned the fabric into a mobi, but found that it didn’t have the kind of drape I thought such a piece needed, so once again I went back to the planning board. I ultimately decided to make it into a top – for me! I got out an old thrift-store sheet I’d purchased just for the purpose of making a pattern and got to work drafting something with straight pieces, using images I’d seen online as my plan. I can’t tell you how many times I put on and took off both the pattern and the real fabric. MANY.

It took a fair amount of pattern tweaking to get it reasonably right. Since my fabric is only 16″ wide and about 76″ long at that point I had to play around quite a bit, but finally finished the top this morning.

I’m happy with the result, although I do wish I hadn’t beat the weft quite so hard. But hey, there’s always next time, right?