inspiration from nature: four leaf motif dishtowels in seasonal colors

My weaving goal this year is to use nature for design inspiration. I started by exploring color combinations from nature, which I've been working on for awhile now:

    Nature's Color Palettes
    Inspiration From Nature: Stripes

I've finally started on a project! My idea is to weave a series of four dishtowels with a nature motif in seasonal color schemes.

I chose a weaving draft with a leaf pattern.



My idea is to make the warp in random seasonal colors, and the weft a solid color to outline the leaves.  

I'm starting with winter. This is the photo I took after our big snow storm.



I couldn't actually make stripes from it like I did in the nature inspired stripes thread, so I created a color palette like the ones I did in my color palette thread.



Then I took a look at my cotton weaving yarns and chose the closest match I could manage. The weft is going to be white, inspired by the snow in the photo. So the leaf shapes will be in white, filled in with the winter colors.



The challenging part was figuring out how to make the color sequence random. I'm not sure why this was important, other than i wanted the focus to be on the leave shapes rather than a stripe pattern. To design a random sequence, I used the Stripes Pattern Generator.



Winding it onto my warping board has been slow going, but I've made a start.

PRETTY!
Can't wait to see how it weaves up.

Awesome design, lovely colours.
Can't wait to see the results!

My warp is measured and I've started threading my loom.



I want 20 ends per inch and I have a 10 dent reed, so, it's two ends per dent.



To keep my random color order, I made sure to sley each dent with different color threads.







As I thread the heddles, I just make sure I don't put two of the same color next to each other.



I'm over half done, but it seems slow going with cheese making, garden prep, and spring planting getting started. But it makes for a wonderful break during the day.

So if it was *truly* random, colours would occasionally end up side by side...

(sorry, but my very old statistics course just floated up and insisted on being heard)

I'm sure they will be beautiful!

Jay, maybe! I used an online random color generator and that's how it did it. I'm thinking that two (or more) of the same colors side by side would create a stripey effect, which I don't want. That said, it isn't as easy to create random as one would think.

Leigh Tate wrote: That said, it isn't as easy to create random as one would think.

It's not at all easy. My understanding is that most of the computer game random generators fall well short.

My old textbook has a text-based random number generator as an appendix. How exactly one would use it to do what you need, would take some thought. Assuming the 4 cones of material in the photo are what you're working with, you might have to give each of them two numbers, and then follow the text generator.

One question is, how much work do I want to make out of it??? It's a fascinating topic. I chose the four colors based on what I already had available. The online generator was easy to use, but it got tricky changing cones of yarn for every length of warp. It got even messier (as in tangled yarn) when I took it off the warping board, brought it to the loom, and tried to figure out which thread was supposed to be next on the loom.

Another question I'm wondering is, what is "random?" My dictionary says by chance, or haphazardly. So if I was being truly random, I would have a "rule" to not have the same color side-by-side, I'd just use whatever I grabbed. As a design element, I've been thinking of random as color order without a discernible pattern. It's funny because when I asked the question "Is anything in nature random" in the permaculture design forum, everyone agreed that everything in nature follows a pattern whether we recognize it or not. So for weaving inspired by nature, i seem to have chosen something that doesn't happen in nature.

For this project, I realize is that from a distance, the four colors will blend visually in the final weaving. They probably won't be distinguishable as individual colors unless one gets real close and takes a look. That kinda makes me feel that I don't have to be terribly fussy about how random my colors actually are.

I've been sampling.



After correcting a ton of threading mistakes, I discovered that the leaf draft I wanted to use didn't work on my countermarch loom. That's because it requires pressing two treadles at a time, but the mechanics of the countermarch loom is that each shaft is tied to each treadle to go either up or down, depending on the tie-up pattern. In my original leaf draft, the treadling pattern requires using treadles simultaneously that have shafts tied opposite. I can't raise and lower a shaft at the same time!  It would work on a jack loom, I think, but for some reason my brain did not catch this for my loom.

So I had to find a new draft.



I've been playing with it, experimenting with picks-per-inch and trying different weft yarns. I like the colors I chose for the winter leaves, but wonder if the leaf pattern is distinct and easy to identify. A few more experiments might be in order.