Having made a successful braid in multi-colored purple and green using inexpensive peaches and cream cotton yarn, I decided to try the same idea in more expensive hand-painted caron silk watercolors.
I find the sprawl of supplies almost as beautiful as the project—at least, till several different projects become piled on top of each other in a confused mess.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Sigh. In fact, I used two different colorways, one with some green, one with all purple (I was thinking about the red and green braid I'd in made before, in which half the ends were red and the other half switched from red to green) but this stuff was much too subtly colored for the effect I wanted.
Because the pattern shows up so badly in the braid, which is fairly fine besides—it's about 4mm in diameter—I decided to liven it up with tassels, a technique I've used before. This time, however, I played with a tassels a bit, decorating the heads with needle lace, and the skirts with random beadnetting and dangles. The tassels are made of a little leftover silk, heavily supplemented with some embroidery floss I purchased in Vietnam. They're roughly 6–8” long, and the twist dot beads are perhaps 8 and 10mm hole to hole. They're made with bullseye, btw, and were a bit of an exercise to see how just how small I could make a decent twisted dot.
Here you can a bit how the colors slowly shift, and also how I failed to arrange the threads properly for the twisted diamond pattern.
At this magnifcation, even silk looks fuzzy!
At any rate, I'm guessing I warped the marudai with this silk before we moved, which means it took over two years to finish the braid.
Hand painted silk, (caron), in kereiko no himo 16 strand (twill) weave, 100g bobbins; some sort of silk-viscose-cotten blend from France (don't recall exactly what the guy said the Vietnamese stuff was), glass seed, bugle, pressed and artist made lampwork beads (bullseye). 74” long, not including 2 9” tassels. Braid completed in late 2003 or (more likely) 2004; tassels added mar 2005.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
