How to approach colour

How to Approach Colour

Colour is a big part of creating and designing a woven piece. Your preferences and choices will be completely personal to you and will make everything you produce truly unique.

Getting Started

There are a few ways to approach colour. We can either plan out our scheme in advance or decide on the colours while we're weaving. It's completely up to you and how you prefer to work.

If you want to plan in advance, you may want to draw your ideas and work out where you want each colour to go in your design.

Making Samples or Wraps

To get a better sense of what the colour of a yarn will look like and how the texture works, it's a good idea to create some miniature samples or 'wraps'. These are a brilliant way to try out different colour combinations and configurations, as well as an opportunity to play with proportion to create a balanced colour palette.

Creating a striped wrap enables us to play around with the sequence of colours and decide which order to use the yarns in a project. These are extremely simple to make. Just wrap the yarns around a rectangle of cardboard and secure them on the back with double-sided sticky tape if you have it.

An interwoven wrap allows us to see how the yarns will look and interact when they are woven together.

YOU WILL NEED:

• a piece of cardboard cut into a square
• double-sided sticky tape
• 2 × different coloured yarns.

How to Make an Interwoven Wrap

STEP 1: Take a small piece of double-sided sticky tape, and stick it down diagonally from one corner to the opposite corner on the back of your piece of cardboard.

STEP 2: Run your first length of yarn along the top edge of your piece of cardboard, lining up the end of your yarn with the edge of the cardboard and press it down to secure it on the tape.

STEP 3: Do the same with the second length of yarn, this time running it along one side of the cardboard at a right angle to the first piece of yarn so that the ends of both yarns overlap on the tape and press to secure.

STEP 4: Turn the cardboard over so that the front is facing up and begin wrapping the yarns. You can play around with the number of times you wrap the yarn round. I suggest that you start by wrapping each yarn twice alternately. Make sure the yarn is wrapped tightly and that each wrap sits neatly next to the one before to hide the cardboard beneath.

STEP 5: Once you have the hang of this technique, you can play around with different yarns and different wrapping sequences.

STEP 6: When you have finished a wrap, secure the loose ends on the back with tape.

Planning Colour with T-shirt Yarn

We can also make wraps using T-shirt yarn. The process is exactly the same. We'll learn later in the course how to make T-shirt yarn.