Cream-colored Scarf
KerryCan at Love Those Hands At Home was curious about the textile that I had beneath the hats in yesterday’s post, so here it is in more detail.
Cream-colored scarf, photographed under daylight lamp.
(Incidentally, KerryCan is doing a lovely series of posts about The Things We Mean To Do, and that series inspired me to do one of those Things on my list in this very post – practice using my camera’s features. Tone-on-tone fabrics are notoriously hard to photograph, so I experimented with different lights and settings here. And then I doctored everything in PhotoShop Elements anyway.)
I think I got this scarf at one of those giant church garage sales. It’s commercial fabric, with four different pattern areas – vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, blocks where those two meet, and large areas of tiny squares. Such subtle detail in the design signifies high quality to me.
Warp- and weft-wise stripes meet in a block design. (Contrast improved digitally.)
This shot shows the true color. I used daylight lamps and a flash.
This simple and gorgeous design fills the body of the scarf, but it is so tiny it is hardly noticeable. Wouldn’t it look great in bright colors in a quilt?
A 28 inch fabric was folded and seamed in the middle back, so that now it is a 14-inch tube, 50 inches long, with short fringe on the ends. The double thickness gives it body and drape. I think it’s made from rayon – it doesn’t give off that feeling of warmth that silk gives. There is no label and I don’t know what era it is from – it just reminds me of something a dashing barnstormer would wear in the 1930s.
From a distance, just a plain white scarf – but a closer look leads to so much inspiration!
Note for weavers: My impression of this weave structure was always that it was an 8-shaft twill block weave, but when I started looking more closely today, I realized that it has to be at least a 16-shaft weave, possibly 20. (The warp-and-weft crossing block would need 8 for a twill and 10 for a satin, and the tiny squares design would also need 8 or 10, so to weave them in separate areas you would need 16, or 20.) I have zoomed in as far as my camera will focus, but I can’t tell if it is a twill or a satin weave. If anyone can help me out here, I’d be grateful!
I really like the design of small counter-changed squares. Weaving just that pattern wouldn’t take so many shafts – maybe someday I will try to thread it up and see what I can do with it!
Good for you for trying out your camera’s special features! It turned out so well, too–the photos show the pattern on the fabric beautifully. I sell a lot of damask linen in my Etsy shop and am always struggling to get good pictures of those white-on-white designs. It’s so interesting to hear a weaver talk about how the pattern is made–I’m glad I mentioned the scarf and that you wrote about it!
Glad you liked it! I learned a lot!