Monday, February 16, 2009

I'm coming to a question...

I started a new piece this week at my teacher's studio.  It is big and more complicated than what I've done before and I spent 3 or 4 days working just on the color with his help.  Yesterday I started the piece with a lovely purple "background" (if there is such a thing in a tapestry) and today I started putting in some colors that I thought were a reddish rust and brown (our words for color are horribly inadequate!).  Turns out when you mix these colors and put them next to a deep purple, you get a rather orange effect.  I'm withholding judgement on the whole thing... but if I decide I don't like it, the 48 inch square piece is going to seem really really LARGE!

One of the other apprentices in the studio today was working on a piece and she said, "I'm coming to a question" meaning she was going to need a little help soon.  But I thought it was a great statement for how I feel lately. Or perhaps how I've felt for about the last year.  I feel that I'm coming to a question and I don't know entirely what the question is and I only have hopes about what the answer might be.  Still, "coming to a question" doesn't seem like a bad place to be right at the moment.

And back to the color musings--I realized that I have to dye more yarn for this piece.  I changed my color scheme--and believe me it had to be done.  If I didn't have such a great teacher and had run away with the scheme I originally proposed, the piece would be one big floor rug in a few months-- or a colorful dog bed liner of fairly expensive wool... so I changed  (and fortunately simplified) the colors, but that meant that I was using fewer of the colors I had dyed and thus will not have enough of them.  I love to dye and generally have been good at matching colors if I have to dye more, though I would prefer never to have two dye lots in a piece... especially because sometimes you can't see what weirdnesses that creates until the piece is done and on the wall.  Anyway, the suggestion I got today was to dye more yarn immediately and mix the old lot with the new (I'm using singles, 3 ply) ASAP.  Smart.  Very smart.  So it is back to the dye pots this weekend for me.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Rebecca!

    Hope your dyeing is going/went well! It's been warming up so much here in Tucson that it is making me think of doing some dyeing myself soon.

    How exciting that you are planning to take Kathe's class at IWC! It would be wonderful to meet you in person. I think Kathy Spoering may be attending IWC as well (for the festivities, not sure if she'll do a workshop) & I also think she usually submits for Fiber Celebrated. I want to submit two pieces, I hope it works out for you to submit something as well. It would be great to have a "bloggers" section in the exhibit, don't you think?

    Lyn

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