Usually, one's trying after a failure. In this case, I was attempting to replicate a success. The peachesNcream cotton yarn may be cheap, without the silkiness of higher quality cotton yarns but it comes in not one but two ombre purple/green colorways, which counts for a lot in my book.
I really liked the way the pattern disappeared into a flurry of pale aqua green in the previous purple and green experiment, and, having failed dismally with the silk, decided to see if i could replicate this in another batch of cotton, since I failed to do so dismally in my silk effort.
Adding the tassel.
In the other purple and green braid, the pattern was more or less bilaterally symmetrical, with the twisted diamonds showing strongly in the middle and the ends, with transitions of aqua where the pattern disappeared, though the one of the transitions was much better than the other: I believe the positioning got out of whack during the braiding, from the yarns stretching unevenly (no doubt my poor braiding technique.)
But I couldn't even figure out how to cut the yarns to get this pattern—all my ‘dissolve’ (in a lavender rather than an aqua) ended up at one end of the braid, and the pattern at the other end. It's a nice enough braid, but doesn't capture what I wanted. It's more successful than the silk version, at any rate. I'm beginning to think that I need some sort of computer program to help me predict how this stuff is going to come out. Other weavers have resorted to this, I understand.
At any rate, I had lots of relatively short pieces left over from cutting the yarn to length, and I used these to make the tassels.
16 strand Kereiko no himo (twill weave) cotton. Roughly a yard/meter long, tassels about 3–4”. 100g bobbins. Braid completed late 2004, tassels added mar 2005.
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