new webpage

Just a quick post.  As beadweaving has become as important a part of what I do as rugweaving, I've wanted to have a website that treated the 2 media equally.  So I've started emiliepritchard.com.  I'm still working on it, adding more pictures, captions and such, but it does basically what I want to do.  Check it out; I'd love your feedback, as it's still quite fluid.

Stalactites rug

One of the fun things about the rugweaving structure I use is that the colors reverse on the back side. The design of my newest rug takes advantage of that to create a light side and a dark side of the rug. The darker side, where the reds and dark blues predominate, is the side I designed. On that side, the red sections get smaller as they go up, and they also get lighter as they go up, so you see more red and less pink. Same for the blues, which predominate at the top where they are dark and get smaller as they get lighter. On the back side the pinks and light blues predominate for the same reason. Either side can be the "right" side, depending on what works in your room.

new rug

This is the other thing I've been working on recently. It's related, in design, to the one in blues and purples with black and white that I showed a couple of posts ago. That one has small black and white areas along the top left and lower right edges of the S. I wanted to expand those areas and create a space that would separate the foreground S from the background. My original plan was to do this in black and white like the other rug, but at the last moment I decided to make the rug much more muted by using tan and green instead of black and white. I like it, although I'm still partial to the older rug.

rug designing

Designing with color is so much fun! Last year I did a big dying sequence and got a whole rainbow of colors, which I blogged about at the time. That resulted in 2 rugs, the 1st 2 you see here (also blogged about before). From the really enthusiastic response I got (and, I must admit, from the quick sale of both rugs too) I decided to do another rainbow dying. This one was a bit different, in that my yarn wasn't natural white, but sort of honey colored. On the other hand, in the earlier dying I had cut my colors with a bit of brown or black in each dye stock to keep the colors just a bit muted, so this time I did more or less similar colors, but without the brown dye since the yarn already had a bit of brown. After 2 days of dying I had pretty much what I had planned on.
I decided the first rug would be similar to the blue/purple/black/white one I did a few years ago(#3 pictured above), which I thought was a really great rug. Only instead of the colors just shifting from blue to plum, the outside would go from yellow to blue, and the center figure would go from yellow to red.
That was the plan. But as I looked at the yarn hanging on the fence to dry, I kept being drawn to the blue-turquoise-green tones. This morning I changed the whole plan to one that's much more muted, in those tones plus the honey yarn that I still have alot of. No pictures yet, but I'll post a picture when it's done.

new rug

Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. I thought I'd do a post about a rug I finished a few weeks ago. I've been doing lots of these striped pieces lately (in fact I've just finished another one but don't have a picture yet. One thing that makes this one interesting is that it uses the same color progressions as the one I posted about a few months ago (September post), but in an entirely different way. The other one had a very regular progression--6" of red followed by 6" of red'orange, followed by 6" of orange and so on. It's the additon of the black design that makes it interesting. This one has just the color progression, but having the 2 sets of stripes alternating with each other and 2 colors in each stripe allows me to actually have 4 different color progressions going at the same time. It's kind of like a round in music. That makes me have to have a pattern that's very simple, and here it's continuous just like the color progressions. I've found, at the couple of shows this fall where I've shown my rugs, that I seem to get more compliments on the earlier one, but, while I like them both, I think this one is my personal favorite.

new rug

I thought since I'd posted my dyed wool yarn, I'd post the rug that I wove from it. I thought the colors came out great, and the design was kept simple so as not to get in the way of the colors. I have enough yarn left for 1 or 2 more rugs using this color progression.

dying yarn

I haven't talked much so far about my rugweaving. My rugs are all about color. More so than the beadwork, because with my wool yarn I can dye my own colors. Last week I did one of my larger dye runs. It started with a page that I clipped out of the Company Store catalog quite a while ago. It showed cotton blankets in a range of colors. I liked that the colors were lively, but still a bit muted. The orange is sort of a spice color, the red is softened, etc. I've done alot of rugs with color progressions, but usually over a smaller range, e.g.yellow to blue or red to yellow. This time I went all the way from red to yellow to blue. I added a few colors to the ones in the catalog picture and changed the value of the colors to get darker hues on the ends and yellow in the middle. Also in the blanket colors there was a big gap between orange and yellow. I added a yellow-orange (the 3rd skein in the picture), but that's still the biggest gap in the series, I think. I dyed 2 lb of each, which will give me enough for around 3 rugs, since I'll partner the colors with a neutral. The 1st rug is on the loom now, and I'm using black with the colors.
in order to do the run I created 3 dyestocks, A blue muted with black, a yellow muted with brown and a red muted with some of the yellow and blue stocks. Then I could create the gradual progressing by putting successively more of one stock and less of the next one so that I worked my way around the color wheel. I still have some red and some blue left, so if I want I could complete the "circle" by dying wome purple yarn, but for the moment I'm leaving it as is.