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Sapphire! |
Marcy Petrini
February, 2026
At the September 2025 meeting of the Chimneyville Weavers and Spinners Guild Vice President Donna Peyton issued a challenge: to celebrate the guild’s 45th Anniversary, each one of us should use a Sapphire color to create a fiber project. The guild will have an exhibit during Sheep to Shawl and pieces are due at the February meeting.
Donna provided a one-page handout chock full of information: the various colors of the sapphire gems, not only various blues, but also pink, yellow, purple, and green. She also included the RGB hex number of Sapphire blue and how it looks.
I knew already that hex numbers define colors according to their composition (red, green and blue, RGB), but how did we go from a gem of various colors to one hex number? Now I had homework to do. Since I am interested in the science of color, this project has been a nice “rabbit hole” to go down, especially since I took my husband Terry Dwyer with me (very helpful with the chemistry and physics). It has resulted in many interesting conversations at the dinner table.
First, the gem. Sapphire is classified as a corundum, a colorless aluminum oxide (Al2O3, for you chemists) with an interesting chemistry. When tiny impurities of titanium and iron replace the aluminum, the corundum can change color. When titanium alone replaces some of the aluminum, the corundum is colorless. If iron alone replaces some of the aluminum, the sapphire can be yellow or green. It’s the combination of the two that gives us blue. Different chemical interactions between titanium and iron give us different blues, darker with more iron, more brilliant from the titanium.
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| Image from Sapphire Color Value Chart (which would really like me to buy a sapphire). |
Other impurities result in the other colors, but the chemical interactions are different since it is only one impurity that produces the color: chromium gives us ruby, a corundum of various reds; vanadium results in purples; black corundum, called emery and used as an abrasive, has a mixture of magnetite, hematite and spinel.
But how did we go from these gems to one generally accepted standard blue sapphire?
The naming and standardization of colors is an interesting subject. In 1929 Munsell derived a system that fiber artists still find useful today. He used a chromatography technique to measure color but also included the psychological portion of color detection. His purpose was not fiber but paper, and other uses, for example food science and soil.
In 1930, Maerz and Paul published A Dictionary of Color which was revised in 1950.
In it they categorized colors with names already in use at the time and matched them to the Munsell system when possible.
In 1956, Color, universal language and dictionary of names, by Kenneth Low Kelly, standardized colors as part of the National Bureau of Standards. The 1976 revision is available for purchase as a black and white reprint, but it has no color plates (!). However, it can be downloaded for free from the NBS with the original color plates as shown below.
Pantone arrived at its own system in 1963, which extends to many different materials, including shiny metallic colors. It is widely used in fashion and in the printing business.
With the arrival of computers, a way to determine the position of each color on a screen was needed; the RGB was standardized (sRGB). When the web arrived in the 1990s, programmers needed a better way to define colors across platforms. The hex system was introduced in 1996 with the first specification of the Cascading Style Sheet used by web programmers. It became the standard.
The hex 0F52BA (on a scale of 0 to 255) is the most widely accepted sapphire number.
I color-coded the hex number because each pair of digits represents a color in the system used for our computer screen, RGB. For the sapphire number, we have 15 Red, 83 Green and 186 blue, which I find easier to think in percentages: 6% of the red (of the total 100% possible red), 32% of the green and 73% blue.
From the hex number, we can find the equivalent color in other systems, for example the cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the colors of our printer cartridges. Pantone uses names which corresponds to hex numbers when possible (but not for the metallics, for example).
It was time to weave. I searched the internet for a yarn with the color sapphire with no luck. My friend Gio Chinchar had the same result.
Time to look at what available colors with known specifications can come close to sapphire.
Lunatic Fringe has yarns that follow the Munsell system. They also have cards for all their colors with information, including the hex number, the RGB number, the value and the Pantone number.
At this point I had looked at enough sapphire blue to think that Mansell Blue 10 could work. This is my favorite blue, and I have used it a lot.
The RGB percentages for the Munsell 10 blue are: 0% red, 31% green and 66% blue. It has a value of 70 (on a scale of 0 to 100), while Sapphire has a value of 60. All and all, not a bad match; 10 Blue has no red, but it has a higher value and thus a bit darker.
To contrast the 10 Blue, I wanted to use a yellow. Doing an after-image gave me a bright yellow. I thought the 10 Yellow would work, but I thought I should check it, especially since yellow sapphire has a hex number.
Here is the comparison:
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Yellow |
100% Red | 84% Green | 0% Blue |
| 10 Yellow: | 99% Red | 89% Green | 0% Blue |
Good match!
Finally, it was time to design the project, a scarf. I thought it may be fun to call it:
Diamonds Sapphires are a girl’s best friend
This is the entire drawdown for the 8” scarf, no repeats. Lots of diamonds sapphires!
Scarf is still on the loom… stay tuned…..
Happy Weaving!
Marcy
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Roc Day & Cotton |
Marcy Petrini
January, 2026
After one year hiatus, it was great to be back at Roc Day. The River Road Fiber Guild hosted in Plaquemine, LA and it was wonderful – good friends, good food and fun activities. Chair Charlene Bishop, Stephanie Keenan, Margaret Garnier and the rest of their “crew” organized everything to perfection. They even cooked for us!
Our guild, the Chimneyville Weavers and Spinners Guild had several attendees. We had a “de-stash” table to raise some money for our educational activities and participated in demonstrations as shown below.
I was asked by Charlene to talk a bit about the Roc Day history. I had written an article about it with emphasis on Mississippi since it was for the digital Mississippi Folk Life publication, but it describes what Roc Day is and some of its origins.
There were door prizes. One of the participants won a lovely box of various cottons to spin: Pima, Acala, brown and green. She came to me to ask me how they were different. I could answer some of her questions, but I couldn’t remember all the details. I told her that I had written a one - page flyer “a couple of years ago” for inclusion in some of the Roc Day goodie bags and I promised I would go home, look for it and send it.
And I did. But the “couple of years ago” were actually 12 since the last revision!
I remembered that Ply magazine recently published an issue on plant fibers which included an article on cotton by Jill Duarte. There wasn’t much new in the article about the cotton plants from what I had written in the flyer, but it made me focus on clarifying my descriptions. I added the article in the bibliography and when I emailed the cotton flyer to my new spinning friend I recommended the article to her so she could learn more about spinning cotton.
Here is a copy of the flyer, including a nice photo of a cotton boll that my husband Terry Dwyer took when I first did the handout, almost 20 years ago! (Download the PDF).
Happy Spinning or Weaving!
Marcy
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(Almost) Always Mix, Never Worry |
Marcy Petrini
December, 2025
“Always mix, never worry” is my motto. I weave a few scarves for our co-op a year and I generally use at least two types of yarns, one for the warp, another for the weft, although sometimes one or the other or both are also mixed. Below is a scarf with a warp of Italian cotton ribbon and a thin weft of 72% kid mohair and 38% silk.
I use nice and sometimes unusual yarns, ones that I have on hand, to keep the cost low and the price for the customers reasonable. Right now, on the loom, getting ready for our Oxford, MS, festival, I have a warp of 80% silk and 20% lavender from https://www.wearwithalltextile.com/ and a weft of mohair and wool blend.
BUT – and here is the big BUT – when I mix, I am familiar with each of the yarns. I have used them before, or if they are new to me, I generally sample them to get to know their characteristics before incorporating them into a project.
My winter weaving class at the Bill Waller Craft Center (https://www.mscrafts.org/) will be starting next week and the subject is for students to weave any item with a fiber they have never used. My suggestion is that they use the same fiber for the yarns for warp and weft. That’s because when using a fiber for the first time, no matter how much you may read about them, you have to learn about them by doing.
The same it’s true for spinning. Once familiar with a fiber, spinners blend to obtain some of the characteristics of each fiber, to make the blend more affordable, or to make it easier to spin.
It’s not surprising that the “Shave ‘em to Save ‘em” initiative of the Livestock Conservancy (https://livestockconservancy.org/get-involved/shave-em-to-save-em/) requests that “show and tell” on their Facebook feed not be of a mixed fiber. The spun yarns and finished products should be one of the sheep breeds on the endangered list not mixed with other breeds or other fibers. To learn about these breeds that we may lose if not protected means that we use them singly first and foremost.
Recently at our guild meeting a member suggested to another spinner that she blend silk with wool to make it easier to spin. The spinner had never spun silk before, and the silks were those below: Bombyx, Muga, Eri, and Peduncle Tasar.
I reacted rather negatively to the suggestion. Even if someone has spun the usual bombyx, these silks are so different that it would be impossible to learn about them by combining them with anything or even each other.
These silks have come to the market rather recently and I fear that they are going to become scarce because of tariffs. So, it behooves us to learn about them while we can.
Mix and not worry, in weaving or spinning but only if you are intimately familiar with the fiber.
Happy Weaving and Spinning in 2026!
Marcy
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Crepes! |
Marcy Petrini
November, 2025
In the October blog, I described my confusion about pebble weave and pebble twill. They are both twills by Emery classification: a progressive successions of floats in diagonal alignments. The pebble twill has a unique threading with a straight draw treadling. The pebble weave uses a straight twill threading with unique treadling steps.
Thus, we can think of the pebble weave as a treadling method for a straight twill threading. Treadling methods are treadling sequences applied to one or more threadings, often twills. This is in contrast to a “twill” which has a threading and its own treadling, the “tromp as writ” treadling.
I also mentioned that it is possible to weave the pebble weave with a treadling that is similar to that of the crepe weave.
That got me thinking: here is another confusing pair, the crepe weave and the crepe twill. While the crepe twill is indeed a twill, the crepe weave doesn’t have the progressive succession of floats that we need for a twill.
The drawdown of the crepe weave below shows the “on opposite”: treadling: 1 & 2 is followed by its opposite 3 & 4; 2 & 4 is followed by its opposite 1 & 3. Thus, this is also a treadling method applied to a straight draw.
The fabric is textured, as seen below. The name comes from fabric made with crepe yarns which the crepe weave tries to imitate.
Crepe yarns are highly twisted and when used in a plain weave warp with alternating S and Z twist yarns, they produce a textured fabric, according to spinning guru Mable Ross.
In contrast, the crepe twill has an interesting threading with 16-thread repeats. In the drawdown below the first repeat is shown in a lighter color to clarify it.
The threading is reminiscent of a tied-unit weave; the first eight threads are the same as the threading of the first two blocks of summer and winter. In the second set of eight threads, the “tie” on shaft 1 pairs with each “pattern shaft”, 3 and 4, followed by the ”tie” on shaft 2 again followed by the “pattern shafts”. The treadling is a straight draw.
This, too, forms a textured fabric, shown below. The first part of the cloth has a different color warp in parallel to the drawdown.
Weaving has been evolving for hundreds of years, in different parts of the world with sparse communication in the past. It’s not surprising that similar names have been applied to different weaving structures.
Happy weaving!
Marcy
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Pebbles! |
Marcy Petrini
October, 2025
A few years back Susan Foulkes used a pebble weave for one of her projects published in Handwoven. In skimming through the article, I vaguely remembered the pebble weave, and I decided it should be something to look up and study. I put “Pebble” on my to-do list.
Eventually I arrived at the “pebble” entry on the list, and I looked up pebble twill in Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. She has three treadlings shown in the drawdown below.
In the drawdown, the first repeat of the threading and the first repeat of each treadling are shown in a different shade to clarify them.
The pebble twill has a very clever broken twill threading; each repeat is eight threads. For the first four, we take the straight twill threading and break it by switching 3 and 4 and obtain: 1, 2, 4, 3, a common way to break a twill. For the second four threads, we take the straight twill threading and move shaft 4 before 2, 3 which results in: 1, 4, 2, 3, not as common, but another way to break a twill.
Below is fabric sample for the first treadling. A single repeat in the sample is marked by a square to highlight it, since it is really hard to detect it.
This is what I like about this twill: the repeat cannot be determined easily because the seemingly randomness causes the eye to jump around and the light to reflect in different directions. This is more effective and more interesting than the usual broken twill (see the Pictionary entry for Broken Twill.).
Below are the other two treadlings that are found in Davison’s book, also shown in the drawdown.
Interesting variations but not as easy to weave unless we re-tie the treadles.
At some point, I realized that Susan Foulkes had called her pattern “pebble weave”, but I just thought they were two names for the same structure as often happens in weaving.
However, this is not the case. The pebble weave is, indeed, a twill by Emery classification, but not the same twill as the “pebble twill.” We usually don’t refer to a single twill as a weave, but it’s not unusual and in this case it may help differentiate between the two.
Below is the drawdown of the pebble weave. It is a straight threading with a treadling that uses the plain weave picks and two of the traditional picks from the straight draw: 1 & 2 and 1 & 4. This combination also results in a broken twill.
Below is the fabric sample, with the square highlighting one repeat of the twill. Davison has another treadling for the pebble weave, similar to the crepe weave (also a twill), using pairs of opposite treadles in the tie-up (See the Crepe Weave Pictionary entry).
The dots that appear in the fabrics may be giving the two twills their pebble names, more obvious in the drawdown than the fabric, and actually, more obvious in the pebble weave than in the pebble twill.
Lots of ways to break a twill and make a fabric with good drape but not an obvious motif.
Happy weaving!
Marcy