Frijoles Creek Remembered

So I had better come clean too.

In the early 80s I attended a conference at Los Alamos. There were about 50 people of whom 6 or 7 were British. The rest were American. It was a very intensive hardworking conference and the organisers gave us Wednesday afternoon off. A local offered to show us round Bandolier National Park and we went past the blasted forests with their 'DANGER' signs through a flat bleak brown landscape all at 7000 ft if it wasn't 8000 ft. Until we suddenly dived into a valley, a cleft in the landscape where houses has been cut into the cliffs and the Frijoles Creek gurgled through a green valley with aspens and grass and meadow flowers. So that's how I remember Frijoles Creek, a place of enchantment in the middle of nastiness. The colours were shades of blue and green, the occasional flash of something brighter and through it all, the water of the creek curling and twisting. There was no-one there but us.

So there are 14 colours of 90/2 silk in the warp, shades of green and blue with some black, the shadows and some flashes of red.  The colours are not random but carefully placed.  I started by painting stripes and ended by modelling the lot in Fibreworks. I matched every colour in RGB and then created those colours in a Fibreworks palette, then  placed them in blocks, then individualy selected the colour of every thread.  The weft is all silver grey. 90/2 silk. The draft is an advancing twill with 8 warp repeats of 172 ends each. The colours do not repeat  with the warp pattern across the warp. There is no repeating pattern in the weft but there is a 'unit' which is used with its mirror in a random number of repeats. The creek gurgling.

So there you are. 3 and a half yards weighs 6 ozs.

And I have no idea what I am going to do with it when it comes home.