P2P2 Reveal Day

Today is Reveal Day for the Pics to Picks 2 a Worldwide Weaving Challenge organised by Meg. When I joined this challenge I believed I had plenty of time to weave something fabulous but I hadn't bargained on this little lady, our newest grand-daughter arriving five weeks early. Her arrival put us in a total whirl and certainly changed my plans, but I have forgiven her as she is so lovely and cute!


 I decided to get as much out of the challenge as I could in the time that I had left.  So I did the following.



 I chose the Bullfrog picture sent to me by Cindy and had already selected a part of the image to work on.  I most often weave with silk so thought I would use a different type of yarn and settled on some fine cottons. I wound a warp intending to weave several samples and with enough left over to weave a light cotton scarf.

The warp was threaded on my Mighty Wolf loom which I must confess I haven't used for several years. Recently I installed a new combby serial interface with the help of John Acord of  Flatwater Farm Electronics  which has resurrected it and I can now run it with a modern laptop using Fiberworks. For the first time I warped my loom from front to back. Years ago I was taught the back to front method and had stuck with it. I decided to challenge myself to do something different - and it worked!

Below is a picture of my first sample. The shapes looked too large and round.  I was trying to indicate the shape of the weed surrounding the bullfrog. So I designed some more weave plans.

This one looked promising.

The sample looks like this.

The lime green weft didn't really work. I tried several more colours trying to keep true to the colours in the photograph.  I wanted to get an overall green look without sacrificing the shapes.

The design shows more from a distance.

I played with the drawdown again, and got this.

Then I used the same threading with  new peg plans.  I designed several peg plans in Photoshop then pasted them into Fiberworks. Here are the results so far.

I have several more designs to weave and about a yard of warp left.

So what have I gained from this challenge?  Most importantly new friendships. Also I have made use on a redundant loom, warped front to back and allowed myself the luxury of seeing where my ideas will take me instead of weaving with an end result in mind.  I have also started blogging which is something that I have been meaning to do for ages.  I have really enjoyed taking part in this challenge. Thank you  Meg for organising everything and for all your support and help. Now I am looking forward to seeing what everyone else has done.  You can to by clicking here.