I just read the best article by Deborah Heyman! It’s at Handwoven.com entitled “Controlling the primaries in your color mixing“. You need to read this article, especially if sometimes your weft turns your beautiful striped warp into mud. I’m going to paraphrase the article really badly for you, so go read the actual article…but essentially it says to watch out when all three primary colors are involved when crossing your warp and weft….if you have a mainly purple and red striped warp (and we know that blue and red make purple)….be careful mixing in that third primarily yellow. So if you use green….which is blue and yellow combined…it might get dicey….use a green that has a lot of blue in it, not a lime green that has a ton of yellow in it.

So I bet if Deborah Heyman reads this she will be pulling out her hair yelling at her iPad …”I never said that!”….so please, read the article…there’s a lot about warm primaries and cool primaries and there are really 6 primaries, not three, but…BE CAREFUL HOW YOU MIX THEM OR YOU WILL GET MUD!

So anyway, it’s an excellent article and I’ve been thinking about that as I warped and am weaving Norbert’s scarfs. So the majority of the stripes are kinda in the same family…light beige, brown and pale orange. I figure that’s red and yellow primaries…but then I put in this vibrant blue stripe to add interest ( which adds blue into the mix).

So for the first two scarfs, my main color was a russet weft with some shots of the other warp colors…they both turned out just fine. Oh! I meant to say really really handsome and masculine…that’s in case Norbert reads this….

But I was getting a bit bored with that color scheme so I thought I would sample using the dark purple…it’s almost black…and black goes with everything, right? But it was a blue black kind of purple….and it just kinda sat there. It’s fine, but it felt flat and really dull. So I dug thru my Zephyr and I had some Plum. Which is also purple, but a very red purple…see what I’m doing…I’m listening to Deborah Haywood….and I tried that! It looks really good! …I’m so excited…I feel like I found the color logic I’ve been looking for…

Blue purple is next to the orange….red purple are the three stripes next to the white.

I wish I could talk about this to Jayne…she probably knew this already…Jayne Schaffer died last week and I miss her. I wasn’t Jayne’s best friend, or closest confidant…but she was my weaving mentor. She taught me about twills, and blocks ( I didn’t know what a block was…). Jayne came over to my house and we sat at the kitchen table and she explained block twills. On graph paper. Old school. I told her I felt like I wished I had started weaving 20 years ago and she told me it wasn’t too late. She told me I could weave anything I could design, and that I had a good grasp of color, and the best way to become a good weaver was to just weave. And weave some more. And if I had questions to come and ask her. So I did. A lot. She gave me confidence. She told me to buy a macomber loom, so I did. She recommended me to Artmakers. I worked harder to be good enough for Artmakers.

I miss her like someone took away my security blanket.

I don’t know where we go when we are gone, but if I could send her anything, I would send her friendship. I send my thanks. I send peace. I send no pain. I send deep cleansing breaths of crisp fall days. I send vistas of all the national parks that she loved. I send her every color I know and every color I hope to find. I send my love.