Blog Catch Up: Red Cloth Is On The Loom!

Along with weaving many, many yards of black cloth, we also performed another great feat during "Apprentice Week". Jacob had two cone winders running continuously from sunrise 'til sunset for a few days to ply the warp threads for the red cloth.

As always, there are several inspirations here. One of them is the most amazing sunset I've ever seen in my entire life in the desert in Madrid, New Mexico. I was so enraptured that my hosts offered to let me stand on top of a trailer truck in their driveway to get a better view. I thought that the highway signs depicting scenery in purple and orange were garish until I saw that sunset.

And this sunset came to mind because I'm entering my next batch of four cloth designs. The first batch was based on the four elements: white for air, blue for water, red for fire, and green for earth. The next four were based on scenery at different times of day (progressing backwards, of course): purple for the sky at twilight, grey for sandstone cliffs at noon, blue for a lagoon at sunrise, and black for the sky at midnight.

This next set of four will be the most technically inspired that I've done. The primary goal is to broaden my use of color by exploring color theory in a more systematic way. This first batch is exploring "adjacent" colors. The color wheel is unlike the spectrum in one obvious way: red connects with purple. For this batch of cloth, I'm exploring this connection by starting with red and including generous amounts of the colors on either side of it: orange and purple.

And, as always, red is nearly impossible to photograph. This beam looks like a flat red even though it is nothing of the sort. The following photos show the thread combinations in different sections of the cloth. Even these are flatter that the real threads.

And, finally, here's one extreme closeup to show how varied the thread colors are in each section. See the purple threads popping out of the orange? In real life they REALLY pop.