Sunday, May 22, 2016

Byzantine in all its colored splendor!

The project: a 60" necklace in Byzantine weave, multi-colored but no black or silver. No problem for the weave ... Byzantine flows smoothly in the making, drapes well, and is generally quite a pleasant weave to work with from the creation point of view.



Multicolored: always an interesting challenge! As I have said more than once, random looks better when it has a little structure to it. The weave works up in pairs of rings, and 12 rings made a unit, so the colors need to be a different number to not fall into a regular pattern. I settled on five bright colors, five slightly pastel, and gold for accents. I set up a pattern to alternate the two sets of colors, and then I tried a random generator tool to place the various colors (which was interesting, but not very successful - however, it did take me back to my high school math days and probability and statistics problems!). The color placement needs to take into account where the colors fall when the necklace is doubled or tripled - that's the tough part! This was my color worksheet:



I was quite taken with the end result ...



... and so was my client!