Marcy Petrini

October, 2022

Do these two motifs look similar? I call the second, the red and green one, a reprise of the first, the blue one. They are both extended undulating pointed twills. In the red one, the pointed twill motifs are interrupted by a stripe of green broken twill. The undulation in the threading is a bit different between the two and the treadling has extra steps in the second.

The blue drawdown was in the August blog as I showed how I “downsized” the draft from my 40-shaft shawl “Ripples on Knoxville Lakes” to 8 and 4-shafts versions. I never wove those versions as they were just to show how designs can be made successful with fewer shafts. The motif, however, remained in my mind until it evolved into the second drawdown.

During HGA’s Weaving and Spinning Week, I gave an “Art Spark” talk entitled Where Does Inspiration Come From? The scarf I wove using that motif is another example.

The inspiration came from the amaryllis shown in the picture below, photographed by my husband Terry Dwyer.

I love flowers but I am not a gardener, I like to say that I have ten purple thumbs. Luckily, I am married to a gardener who keeps flowers in our yard nearly year-round.

I am particularly fond of amaryllis because my Father-in-Law used to send them to us for the holidays when we couldn’t be together. The red and green may be reminiscent of Christmas, but we have lots of red flower in the garden and I think of the red and green as colors for all seasons.

As I sat down to figure out what structure would be good to depict this flower, I returned to the extended undulating pointed twill from the “Ripples on Knoxville Lakes” shawl. The green broken twill surrounds the red motif, as the green leaves surround the flower in the picture; the center of the twill is salmon to reflect the pistils of the amaryllis.

There are many ways of extending twills, especially pointed twills. There are many ways of undulating twills. Taken together, the possibilities abound. In both cases I repeated the undulation to the extended legs of the twill, but it wouldn’t have to be the same or symmetrical. Maybe this motif will come back later….

The scarf is 10/2 silk warp and weft. The warp is variegated red, the weft is a red with a bit of orange, slightly variegated. The green stripes are also variegated. Here is the scarf.

And here is the close up:

Happy Weaving!

Marcy