The Beauty of Shadow Weave

I love this fabric so much! The way the warp and weft optically blend into so many different colors in this four-color shadow weave pattern is just so visually pleasing. 

It’s a mix of a muted dark green and a vivid yellow-green in the warp, crossed with a muted maroon, and a bright icy blue in the weft. Here are the yarn colors:

To make a good four-color shadow weave effect there need to be two dark colors and two light colors. There needs to be good value contrast between the light and dark colors, but the two darks and the two lights need to have almost the same value in black and white. Because of this, when I select yarn I always take a photo like the one above, and convert it to black and white: 

You can see that the maroon is slightly darker than the dark green, and the ice blue is slightly lighter than the spring green, but they are very similar. There is also significant value contrast between the darks and the lights. 

The next thing to determine is how the colors will look when they start visually blending. I could have just worked on faith and wound a warp, but I’ve had some of my color choices come out pretty pukey so I decided to do a couple color tests. First I spent a morning with a lap loom making a little color-and-weave tester: 

It was promising. I knew I also wanted to make card woven strapping for this project, so I did a little test of that as well, in the form of a strap for my new phone holder gizmo: 

Again, I was pleased with the color harmony here. So I warped up the loom and started weaving: 

And ended up with fabric that looked nice straight off the loom: 

And even better after a wash: 

This is destined to be a computer bag. It was *planned* to be a pocketbook, but I didn’t end up getting the shrinkage I calculated or the PPI I intended, so it’s a bit too wide and way too long for that use. 

I’m in the process of warping again, having altered my sett to (hopefully) be able to beat square and adjusted the warp and weft counts to (hopefully) get closer to my goal. 

It’s kind of a flex, but I want to weave a continuous piece of fabric with no repeats, and have it become a fringed front flap that wraps over the top of the bag into the back, folds at the bottom to become the front, and is grafted on the sides such that the pattern appears seamless.

I could of course cut down the fabric I’ve already woven to make a lovely bag, but it wouldn’t be the same. Also I am enjoying the exercise of trying to weave exactly to spec. I just need to get better at estimating shrinkage and at remembering to make sure I’m hitting my PPI targets while weaving!