Warps with multiple parallel lines have drawn me to using rainbow colors. It took a while for me to appreciate that dialing down the color volume gives equally interesting results. For one of my latest shawls, I stuck to a warp of blues and purples.

My weaving life has been revolving around echoes for months now. With any chosen combination of 8 colors in mind, one could go with either the echo-4 or echo-8 technique to make a wonderful project. I decided to do a fun experiment to compare cloths yielded by these techniques.

Last spring, I made a shawl in Turned Taquete based on the Fibonacci sequence. When my mother saw this shawl, she said she would like one in a different color combination. I was happy to comply, but made one additional little change besides the color choice.

Working with 8 warp colors in echo-4 and echo-8 designs gives room for ample color combination experiments. After I tried out a bright colored rainbow, I wondered what result a combination of light, bright and dark colors would bring. The color combination I came up with looked rather curious as a mere warp, but turned out to be a wonderful palette once intersected with weft threads.

After having woven my first shawl with 4 echoes, I find myself completely submerged in the echoes techniques set forth by Marian Stubenitsky in her book ‘Weaving with Echo and Iris’. I have so many things I would like to try out, that I can easily keep myself busy for months. So, I decided to be efficient and combine several experiments into one project. I wove my first shawl with 8 echoes — and experimented with color combinations and sett along the way.