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Grey value squares

Using a Painted Warp: Understanding Value

One of my favorite parts of working with a painted warp are coming up with ways to use it on a loom. I have lots of ideas floating around in my head always. However, my children are young, and I haven't had much opportunity to weave with the warps I paint since I started this business. I will get the chance eventually, but for now, here are some ideas and considerations for working with your painted warp.

First and foremost, pay attention to VALUE.

The lightness or darkness of a color or hue is called it’s VALUE.

The lighter the color, the higher the value. For example, Yellow has a higher value than Purple. You change the value of a hue by adding white, grey or black.

 

Switching to greyscale allows you to see the value of the colors more clearly.

About using your phone to find value: some people will use the black and white filters on their phone cameras to find value. This can be helpful, but it can also be deceiving. Phones have color filters to enhance photo quality, that may produce results that are inaccurate to the actual values.

Four different greyscale filters get four different results.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't use a phone filter to determine color values, but it is something to pay attention to. If values are similar to each other, a phone won't be reliable. But often, especially when picking colors to compliment a painted warp, you're looking for high-contrast values, and a phone camera will usually work for this.
If you want a physical tool, you might look into Red and Green Color Evaluators. These are a common quilting tool for seeing color in greyscale. You can find them as rectangular ruler-sized filters, or as glasses.

Why is Value Important?
You want to choose colors to compliment your warp. My desire is to showcase the painted warp in a weaving, so I do this with high contrast values. 

Black and white are the highest contrast values. In the example below, you can see as the grey values get closer to the blue value, the blue becomes less vibrant. If you want your painted warp to stand out, you want the highest contrast value. Perhaps you find your warp is too vibrant? You could lower the value contrast to make the colors more subdued.


I often choose a black or very dark color to contrast my warps. 

I like bright colors, and the dark value makes the vibrant colors pop more than white. Midnight, Deep Sea, Amethyst, and Auburn are my current go-to colors for dark values.


Swirling Snowflakes twill pattern, with Amethyst weft as a dark contrast.

 

Turned Taqueté pattern, with Black in the warp and Deep Sea in the weft as the dark contrast.

 

Log cabin pattern, which is a color effect using light and dark colors to create the illusion of a pattern. In the warp, the light color is Mardi Gras and the dark color is Black/Midnight. In the weft, the light color is Sea Breeze and the dark color is Black/Midnight. The Sea Breeze color does tone down the Mardi Gras colors a bit, but is similar enough in value. White would have washed out the Mardi Gras colors more.

Shiny Dime Fibers Hand-Painted Tencel™ Yarn - Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras warp in black and white. Mardi Gras is a very vibrant warp.
Sea Breeze in black and white. It is slightly lighter in value than the warp, and the grey tones make it a bit less vibrant.

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Unraveling the Mystery: 5/2 vs 8/2 yarn

Unraveling the Mystery: 5/2 vs 8/2 yarn

In my shop, I identify the different gauges of my yarn using an industry designation. This is a system that weavers use when purchasing yarn, so they know what size yarn they are buying and what sett to use when putting it on the loom. (Sett is how many threads per inch weaving width.)

What they actually translate into is pretty confusing. For our purposes, I’m going to talk about “English Cotton Count” only, since the yarn in my shop follows this industry standard. There are other counts for linen and wools (and blended yarns can get even more confusing). English Cotton Count is sometimes abbreviated as Ne, NeC or Ncc on a cone of yarn (although on my Tencel™ cones I think it’s literally just CC for cotton count).

The first number indicates the “count.” This is an old cottage industry standard for identifying how many 840 yard lengths you get in a pound of yarn.

  • A single strand of yarn with a count of 5 would have 840 x 5 = 4200 yards per pound.
  • A single strand of yarn with a count of 8 would have 840 x 8 = 6720 yards per pound.

The second number is the amount of plied strands. So 5/2 and 8/2 have two plied threads, or two threads spun together. You would DIVIDE your count number with the number of plied strands to figure out your total yards per pound.

In the case of 5/2 Tencel™:

  • 5  ÷  2  = 2.5, your cotton count number
  • 840 x 2.5 = 2100 yards per pound (ypp)

In the case of 8/2 Tencel™ (and also 8/2 Ringspun Cotton):

  • 8  ÷  2  = 4, your cotton count number
  • 840 x 4 = 3360 yards per pound (ypp)

So as you can see, these numbers can give you some indication of what a yarn will be like in thickness, density and strength. The more plies a yarn has, the more twist it contains, which makes it stronger and more dense.

Here's another example: let's compare 8/4 cotton yarn and 5/2 cotton yarn. An 8/4 cotton contains finer threads, but is denser and contains less yardage per pound than 5/2 cotton because of the amount of plies. The threads of the 8 count yarn are thinner than 5 count yarn, but 4 plies makes a denser, stronger yarn than 2 plies. 8/4 cotton yarn is often used as a “carpet warp” yarn, as it works great for rugs and weavings that require a strong dense yarn. 5/2 cotton is a heavy cotton yarn (at least by weaving standards), often used for garments, blankets and home goods.

  • 8/4 cotton yarn:  (8 ÷ 4) x 840 = 1680 yards
  • 5/2 cotton yarn:  (5 ÷ 2) x 840 = 2100 yards

So to summarize:

A higher count yarn will have thinner threads than a lower count yarn.

The more plies a yarn has, the stronger and more dense it is.

Most yarn suppliers will give the information you need with the yarn so you don’t have to do all these calculations. SDF provides the recommended weaving sett and yardage on the product page, as well as with the yarn tag.

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