Marcy Petrini 

July, 2025 

I had a fabulous time in Albuquerque teaching at the Intermountain Weavers Conference. The conference was so well organized, it is hard to believe that it was all volunteer work. I taught about color, both as a seminar and as part of designing twills. And I am still thinking about the interactions of various colors. One of the things that we need to consider when dealing with these color interactions is resolution.

For our purposes, resolution is how fine of a detail we can detect, for example how small a motif we can perceive.

The further away we are from any motif, the harder it is to distinguish it. Similarly, at the same distance, a larger motif may be detected, while a smaller one cannot.

Look at the scarf in the photo below. It is woven with a blue warp, as can be easily seen, and a variegated weft of blues, golds, and rusts.

When we look at the entire scarf, we see stripes that change colors and move our eyes along the fabric, especially where the light hits the scarf.

If we look closer, as in the photo below, we see distinct small stripes, which appear to have some texture.

Closer still, we see that the stripes alternate between background and a raised motif.

Zooming in shows us that the stripes are formed not only by the yarn colors, but also by the structure. It is a pointed twill threading, woven with alternating treadling steps of a motif forming crosses, and plain weave. Thus, the colors stand out in the motifs and recede in the plain weave background, giving the fabric a three-dimensional appearance, which helps reflect the light.

A final zooming in, shows the individual threads. The floats in the motif are visible, as well as the background plain weave.

This is how changing distance changes resolution and what fine details we can see.

Why should we care about resolution? Two things, really: optical blending and planning for distance viewing.

When our visual system fails to resolve colors or motifs, optical blending results. This can be good or bad, depending on the colors used or the outcome we wish.

The fabric in the picture below has a warp half green and the other half yellow. The same two colors are used for weft. We can see that where the yellow and green intersect with plain weave, a yellow-green fabric results. If we were looking just at the yellow and green sections, we wouldn’t know that the yarns weren’t yellow-green. The optical blending gives us a new color in the fabric.

Optical blending, however, can also result in lifeless fabrics. This can occur in particular with colors on the opposite side of the opponent spectra (see June 2025 blog for the description of the opponent system):

Red ↔ Green Spectrum

Blue ↔ Yellow Spectrum

Below is a close up of a plain weave fabric woven with a red warp and a green weft. The opponent colors become browned out; since there is poor resolution at this distance, optical blending results. Choosing a weft that is not the opponent color would have prevented this. As we described in the June blog, we can determine the true opponent of any color by doing an after image.

The second reason to care about resolution is that we want to plan our fabrics for the distance at which they will be viewed. For instance, a scarf will be viewed at an arm’s length, unless it is displayed at an exhibit. A tablemat will be viewed closely if placed on a table when eating.

Planning the fabric so that it will be interesting both close up and further away can be challenging. I have seen beautifully intricate fabrics close-up in exhibits only to have them become a beige blur when stepping away.

Check your fabric while still on the loom, looking at it from different angles and distances, thus changing the resolution. The scarf at the beginning of this blog shows different aspects of the fabric at different distances as we have seen. We will never see the same details at different distances, but we do want to make sure that the fabric is attractive at all the distances at which we will view it as the resolution changes.

And you thought resolution was only a feature of your new smart phone!
(Or Lent -- T.D.)

Happy Weaving!

Marcy