The Variegated Navy (Not Purple) Warp Series / Covid Rant

I bought this possum/merino/silk cone ages ago. The sample had a lot of purple and some blues, overall medium  in value, but what I received was dark, dark, dark, with nary a purple in sight. In fact, my impression was "mostly dirty indigo". So the cone sat and sat and sat o the shelf, and then I made a warp with it because it was taking up precious space. At least I knew the quality is good. Then the warp chain hung and hung and hung waiting to be chosen until this winter. I thought I could add purples and teal and green or lighter blue to lift the dark, sad warp.

 

(I thought to post about this warp several times, but for some reason the colors in the photos come out very inaccurate, so you'll just have to put up with my explanations in words. Sorry...) 

In real life, the whole sample is more sombre, uniform in value, and it's hard to see warp colors other than mid-blue or dark green. I started sampling from the right side of this pic. A is possum/merino/silk in teal, and I confess I was always going to weave a piece in this weft for optimal texture. 

I'm not sure if I should even post this pic because the piece doesn't look anything like this; it's a nice blue-y teal, fluffy, and you can hardly see the warp colors, but there you have it, the mystery of (digital?) photography.
 

Ben really liked B, two different skinny yellow-green merino plied together, (because there is a small amount of darker yellow green in the warp,) and he wanted the piece, so he got one. Sorry for the wrinkles, he's been wearing it in the house in the mornings. (The temperature is usually in the low teens when he "goes to work", although by lunch time the scarf comes off.)

The wefts are more saturated, the middle part of the piece is not paler, and it looks like a yellow and indigo piece. The silk in the warp shimmers, and give the piece a silky look. 

At the end of the first sample above, I thought wefts not too close on the color wheel to the warp may make the different warp colors pop up, so I plied red and hot pink of the same skinny yarn as Ben's piece and tried it. I wanted to investigate it a little more, so I wove a second sample, with, from right to left, hot pink and orange, hot pink and red, and red and orange. You might be able to tell the middle stripe, hot pink and red, are closest to each other. The two stripes on the side have a bigger gap in the value, (hot pink and red being darker than orange,) they look more speckled, which in turn allows different warp colors to react to the neighboring weft color and show up more clearly. Do I make sense? To paraphrase, the value differences in the weft colors allow different warp colors to.... show more frequently.  

This is the most disappointing pic because the overall piece is a richer, deeper, nicer "red", not dark like seen here. I wanted most of the piece to be hot-pink and orange or red and orange to take advantage of the speckles, and I started out with fussier stripes, but the pattern distracted from showing off the warp colors, so most this piece has wider stripes without the red and hot pink stripes. This one also has a nice shimmer. 

 

It was a more exciting project and I enjoyed the sampling very much. But all the fancy buttons and options on the phone/camera, and shooting in different weather/light, wouldn't allow me to show you what they really look like. Sad-face.

 

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A bit of Covid rant. Late on Monday, Jacinda announced all Covid rules/systems will be scrapped at midnight. I didn't watch it, but Ben said masks are required only at medical and aged-care facilities; if one tests positive, seven day isolation is required, but not for those who live with them. We rushed to the supermarkets on what would be the last day masking was required in supermarkets, where between one-third and half were masked. Staff had masks, but some wore them under their noses, at least one as a chin protector. On Tuesday, there were just under 2000 folks around the country reporting they tested positive; today, Wednesday, I couldn't find numbers. 

 

My personal preference would have been to keep the Levels system; we lived happily under the loose Level 1 between late 2022-much of 2021. In the end there was a fairly good understanding of the systems, and if numbers rise again, we can go back to the "familiar" rules. The traffic light system brought in sometime in the middle of Delta/Omicron, I'm convinced, to change the language and appease the anti- folks, but I think it confused folks. Medical professionals said so. 

Ben now has no official backing/reason to work from home, and he expects to be called back to work at work, and I am extremely anxious. Just the other week during the flooding, there were two colleagues out with Covid in their small department, never mind the whole school with our without rules.

 

I also worry about what kind of repercussion might be waiting for those of us choosing to wear masks, as hate thrown at us Asians wearing masks before the mandates was ugly. (New Zealand was very slow to start masking; rules were unfailingly wishy washy - many situation it was only "strongly recommended" instead; and there was always an unsmall section ignoring them anyway.) Even though I dislike masks, and it's getting warmer here so it'll be increasingly uncomfortable, we intend to keep wearing them for the foreseeable future. But also, for now, they are great for hay fever.

So, anyway... I'm trying not to loose my mind with worries. There have been an obscene amount of chocolate and potato chips involved since Monday.