Vines and Wines

I’m in love with this pattern! The scarf turned out beautifully and I know that I’ll definitely be using this pattern again! The pattern is a ten shaft, ten treadle advancing twill. It was woven as drawn in and has only a three thread float. The pattern repeat is 33 threads, so it goes on extremely easily and weaves quickly. The warp was 2/20 hand painted silk, and while the painted warp was lovely it really posed a huge set of problems. Every weft that I tried seemed to blend in with one of the colours or the other, so basic black was my best option. It wasn’t the option that I wanted because it masked and changed the values of the warp colours. The warp was very lively in colour when I dyed it, and now it’s very subdued….ah well, the best laid plans and all that! The great thing about this scarf is the optical illusions that the pattern produced. The scarf is totally flat, but appears to be a series of raised pillows – very cool. The reverse of the scarf is the essentially the same. After looking at the grapes on my arbour which are budding up nicely – Pinot Gris came to mind as a name for this scarf as it has all the same colours as the grape variety.Our weather has not been stellar this year, but my faithful clematis vines are almost all in bloom now, so I thought I’d share a few photos I took this morning. This clematis is pale pink with lilac stripes and has blossoms the size of dinner plates – really massive!This is a local native variety and soon the whole fence will be covered in these sweet yellow bells and then the seed heads give another great show in the autumn.This is one of my oldest vines, it was here when we bought the house twenty years ago and the flowers are a dark magenta, it will completely cover on side of my garden shed by fall. Not too many of these vibrant purple with pink stripes are in bloom right now, but soon they will put on a huge display.An electric red violet is the closest I can describe this one….so pretty.I used to have six or seven peony varieties, but it seemed as soon as they started to bloom we would get rain and then I’d be left with a huge mess – this pink peony is the last man standing!