How to USE a Color Gamp

Congratulations!  You have woven a color gamp!  Now, what do you do with it?  It is a gorgeous piece of fabric...it looks great as a wall hanging, or as a throw in your favorite chair, and your grandbaby thinks it is to "drool" for.  But, what else can you do with it?

Our favorite reason for creating a color gamp is to use it to plan future projects.

A perfect example of how we use our color gamps to plan a project is to show you how we designed the Fiesta Shawl and Runner project that was featured in Handwoven May/June 2014.

Sett Fiesta Shawl, back view

We started off the design process on the Fiesta Shawl and Runner project with the premise that we wanted a purplish shawl and runner in 10/2 Tubular Spectrum™ mercerized cotton yarns.  And we wanted the shawl and runner to looks as different as possible from each other. Even though they would be made from the same warp. With that in mind, we pulled out our handy, dandy gamp to make some color decisions.

 

baby-ebook-gamp-crop-1.jpg
Sett Fiesta Table Runner

Color Interactions are what a gamp shows best!

Tubular Spectrum Plus Gamp Swatch

As we mentioned in our blog post about how to arrange the colors in a color gamp, there are lots of color interactions in a color gamp.  Every warp stripe interacts with every weft stripe. Every color crosses itself as well as all of its neighbors both near and far.  And the pure colors are on the diagonal.  A 20-color gamp contains 400 color interactions!  That is a lot of information!

Therefore, you can look at how the colors interact with each other as groups on the color gamp.  Or you can isolate individual colors to see how just those two interact on a particular square of the color gamp.

Isolate to Select the Colors

Colors are like nosy neighbors:  they get into each other's business and influence the way their next-door neighbors look.  To effectively see individual colors on a gamp, you need to isolate color squares or areas of the gamp.   Use two L-shaped pieces of paper to isolate the squares.  Or use your hands with the thumbs extended in an L-shape.

We have created a file with a set of these L-shaped pieces of paper that you can download and print out.  Click here to get the file.

Using white L-shapes to isolate the colors on the gamp, as shown on the right, we focused on the purplish area of the gamp.  Then we made the first decision to narrow our color choices.  We wanted to stick to the red side of the purple spectrum rather than the blue side.

A Runner and a Shawl from the Same Warp?

Now we had a general feel for the fabric that we wanted to create.  The next question was how to make the shawl and runner look different by using the same warp?

As you can see from the part of the gamp shown on the right, when you isolate the purple section, the top right corner looks very different from the bottom left corner.  We could use that difference to select the colors for the runner and shawl.

Using a purple yarn would make the shawl fabric look like the top right corner.  A red yarn would make the runner fabric look like the bottom left corner.

Isolate colors with white L-shapes
10 Red
5 Red Purple
10 Purple, 8 oz cone

Decision time!

Then we looked at the individual squares on the gamp to decide which colors we liked as they interacted in the woven cloth.  We settled on 10 Red and 5 Red Purple as our main warp colors, with 5 Red Purple, 10 Purple and 5 Purple as the shawl weft colors.  10 Red and 5 Red Purple would work well as the runner weft colors.

Add some spice!

The final decision was to select the spice color to give our warp an extra zing.

We decided to use 5 Yellow Red because it showed up well with all the colors that we had selected, created a little bit of vibration with 5 Purple and would add just a bit of high value contrast to keep your eye moving around the fabric.

We were happy with the results and were glad we had our Color Gamp to guide us.  At that point, we were ready to warp a loom and turn up the music for some weaving time!

5 Yellow Red, 1.5 oz mini cone
5 Yellow Red, 1.5 oz mini cone
Sett Fiesta Shawl, front view
Sett Fiesta Shawl, back view
Sett Fiesta Table Runner

                                                                                Originally published May 10, 2017

1 thought on “How to USE a Color Gamp”

  1. I have the 20 cone set in 10/2. I haven’t made a gamp so I guess I need to start there first. I would like to make some usable out of the set as well. Suggestions?

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