In the course of human events….
there comes a time when a project does not turn out quite the way you like. And I’ve said this before…
Howl’s Lair (the post linked above) was more of a failure in being very different from my vision of what I wanted to make–and I learned from that. By now I know how to create what I was going for then, and am thinking of trying it, actually.
This time as I watched the colors spinning out, I thought…Uh-Oh.
Spinning Up
That didn’t look like it was going to ply nicely Navajo style at all. I was already inserting sections of purple, and tried to put it between the dubious green-purple mud between the bright green and dusty purple of the roving. This worked…to an extent.
some dubious color combos visible...
The theme I had in mind was The Perilous Gard–a story tying in themes of Tam Lin, set in Elizabethan England where the Folk under the Hill are literally living in a tunnel system carved out by an underground spring, right by the old manor. The Halloween deadline for the tiend, tithe the heroine is wanting to prevent makes this actually still fit the theme, though it’s got splashes of brighter color than I realized.
- The Dancing Tree
Sorry for the huge full-view…but not that sorry. It’s kind of really interesting to look at, strand by strand! Taken together it looks better than I thought it would, though the abrupt changes due to the Navajo plying surprised me, and still are not quite what I would have wanted. But I’ve got a feel for the process now, and how that plying process affects the look of colors on a roving like this.
It will be good to have practiced before doing the Phoenix yarn I want to create this way. It will be a more specific progression, so I think it will be less complex, but it’s also good to know how the colors get flipped with the looping… (Sorry. If you don’t know what Navajo plying is you’re probably lost–it involves making a single strand a cascading series of slip-knots that twist up with the strand-tail, and then making a new loop…)
the backdrop got obscured, but here it is...
GossamerSong - every skein a story 