Colour matching in Fiberworks PCW

I've got an order for a wool blanket in as similar a colour combo as I can get to my cotton/acrylic 'Beach' palette, or rather the modified version of Beach that I used in a blanket for the same customer recently. This was woven on that warp, but her blanket used a teal 8/8 cotton weft rather than the yellow 4/8 boucle:



The wools I use don't come in the same shades as the cottons and acrylics, of course, so I went through my sample cards and found the best matches I could. These will be the predominant colours:


As I've talked about elsewhere, it's taken me a while to get used to planning warps for my wool blankets since putting the sectional rakes on Mabes. The planning is the sticky bit, as I much prefer to let stripes happen spontaneously - I wind chains of one or more colours until they seem "about right" (very subjective!) and then switch to a new chain. Some chains are skinny, some are wide. Some are solid, some are striped. Once I've got enough threads for the warp, I flop them over the front beam of the loom and move them around until I find the arrangement pleasing. This does not work with sectional warping!

Since the advent of the rakes, I've tried planning my stripes by moving around balls of yarn or doodling on paper or by working them out in Fiberworks PCW, but nothing's been very satisfying. Fiberworks has been the best approach but I've always been frustrated by trying to get the colours to really match the yarns I'm using. I've tried their colour editor but just haven't been very successful matching the ball in my hand to the colour on the screen.

Today, though, I finally tried something I've been thinking about for ages and it was, as they say, The Business. Here's what I did:

1) I took the picture above of the colours I plan to use, without flash to get as close to the actual colours as possible.

2) I opened the picture in Photoshop and made some minor adjustments to make the colours even more accurate. In this case, that meant Image -> Adjustments -> Variations... -> more green. For some reason, when there isn't enough natural light, my camera tends to skimp on the green, like it did here.

3) I zoomed way in on each ball and used the eyedropper tool to "pick up" the colour of that ball. This required clicking on the ball several times until I got something close, as every pixel is its own colour and some are highlights, some are shadows - you'd be amazed at the variety in a chunk of seemingly solid colour.

4) This put me in the right colour neighbourhood but still didn't give me exactly what I wanted so I opened the colour editor and used the mouse to move the little circle around until the colour selection seemed perfect. The colour editor displays the colour in various ways, including its RGB value. Here's what it looks like:



See the colour indicator in the small toolbar way over on the left? That's the one you left click to open the editor. See the little white circle in the bottom right part of the colour gradient window? That's the guy you drag around to change the colour selection. See the highlighted blue text in the colour editor? That's the R(ed) value, which is above the B(lue) value, which is above the G(reen) value.^,1 This RGB value is also one of the ways you can enter colours into the editor in Fiberworks, so make a note of it. In my example, my colour's value is 20, 72, 69.

5) I opened Fiberworks and started editing the top five colours in the palette on the very right side of the screen. FYI: you'll want to avoid editing the very top value, that white one which is labeled -, 'cause doing so seems to mess up the works. Looks like that colour gets used for more than just applying colours to your warp, so leave it alone and start with the one below it, labeled 1, or whichever other one you find easiest to use.

To edit a colour in Fiberworks, right click on the little coloured box in the palette. This opens up its colour editor which, sadly, is not as intuitive or easy to use as Photoshop's. Still, if you're armed with an RGB value from Photoshop or some other photo editor, it's easy peasey to enter it into the RGB fields at the bottom - the other fields will take care of themselves:


Here you can see that I've entered the RGB value from Photoshop (20, 72, 69) at the bottom of the editor and the colour at the top has miraculously changed to match my ball of yarn. You might also be able to tell that I've entered my five colours in the first five positions in the left hand column of the colour palette to the right (skipping the white one at the top). As a bonus, you can also see the stripe arrangement I settled on in the end for my blanket warp.

Happily, I have enough yarn for the warp in my stash, so I can start winding bobbins and then winding on right away. I might have to order a little for the weft since I'll put on enough for three blankets but then again I might just dig through the stash and improvise with what I've got on hand. At least in the weft I can still let my stripes be totally spontaneous!


1. Incidentally, the hex value below those - the one that starts with the hash (#) - is the colour code you'd use in html. If you ever want to make a webpage background or text match your photo, that guy's the one you want.

ER Heddles to the rescue!

As I was threading the warp I talked about a few days ago, I realized that I'd under estimated the number of heddles I needed on shaft 3, by a dozen or so. As luck would have it, I realized this once I had the warp half threaded and was at the centre of the loom near the treadle cords, where it's most awkward to add heddles without unthreading everything. It's possible, mind you, and I've done it but it's no picnic and usually requires about five hands and a fair bit of swearing.

Fortunately, I had a stroke of laziness and thought of a trick to try. It worked so well that I thought I'd share, in case someone out there hasn't already thought of this. One caveat: this works with string or texsolv heddles and on a loom with wide, wooden heddle bars, like a Glimakra. I haven't tried it on Joey so am not sure how it could be adapted to metal heddles on a skinny metal bar.

To make two ER heddles:

1) You need: two texsolv or string heddles the same size as those already on your loom and a safety pin. The pin should be at least as long as the heddle bar is wide but not too long - you don't want any more stuff than strictly necessary getting tangled up under there.

2) First, thread an end of Heddle 1 through an end of Heddle 2, then through the other end of Heddle 1.

3) Pull on the loose ends of both heddles to pull the slack out of the knot. As it begins to snug up, you'll see that Heddle 1 is forming a lark's head knot around the end of Heddle 2. Pull on the end of Heddle 1 to flatten it out, so that the two heddles together form a square or granny knot. It should look like Picture 3.

4) Pull the knot up tight, then drape the heddles over the top heddle bar with one heddle hanging in front and the other behind. Make sure they hang past the lower bar in the same configuration, then safety pin the bottom of the heddles together under the lower bar. This maneuver is easier if you've lifted the bottom heddle bar slightly to take the tension off the heddles.

Then just go ahead and thread the two heddles like they were on the bar normally. When I did this, the front one tended to sit slightly to the right of the back one, so I threaded that one first. When you're threading and there's no tension on the warp threads the heddles will shift up and down rather alarmingly but don't worry. Once there's tension on the warp threads, they'll want to find a happy medium and, since both threads are on the same shaft, they'll even themselves out.

As you can see from the first pic, I added 12 ER heddles all in one spot. You can see all the safety pins holding the bottoms of them. You'd think it would be especially problematic to cheat so much all in one spot and, had I realized sooner that I was running out of heddles, I would have spaced the cheater heddles out some across the width of the warp. Much to my relief, however, it worked so well that I can't even tell where they are when I'm weaving. Frankly, I'd forgotten all about doing this until today.


Here's the proof: these are same threads from the first pic. Can you see any unevenness where the ER heddles are? I bet you can't!