WeaveMaker User's Manual — Color Cornucopia

Color Cornucopia
The cornucopia tool creates a wide variety of color arrange-ments automatically. When you click with the cornucopia tool in the color bar of the warp or weft, a selection of colors, chosen from the color chips you have placed in the colorway window, is used to construct an entirely new color arrangement. In creating a color arrange-ment, the cornucopia follows one or more sets of rules known as “schemes.” There are four ways you influence how color arrangements are constructed:

Scheme Selection
By judicious selection of schemes, you can most strongly influence the types of color arrangements the cornucopia tool gives you. Some schemes give fine-grained color arrangements, others give bold stripes, and still others do sweeping “fades” where one color gradually dissolves into another. Some schemes follow the weave, building a color arrangement based on the weave structure.
Major/Minor/Accent
The “major/minor/accent” color categories in the colorway window strongly influence the color cornucopia.
Marquees and Repeat Blocks
The color cornucopia tool obeys the rules of repeat blocks (Please see “Repeats” in the Index for more about controlling repeats). So you can use the cornucopia tool to build a small color arrangement, which then gets repeated over and over to build up the entire fabric color arrangement.

Getting Started
Just to get started exploring the color cornucopia, you may tem-porarily ignore the schemes, because until you specify other-wise, all the scheme rules are in effect.

To try the cornucopia tool, first drag some color chips into your colorway window (please see “Colorway” in the Index for more about Colorway window). Put at least two colors in the Warp/Major area.
Click on the cornucopia tool in the Tools window (it will turn black. Please see “Tools” in the Index for more about the Tools window.
Position the cursor over the warp colorbar in the design window (please see “Colorbar” in the Index for more about the colorbar). Notice that the cursor changes into a cornu-copia shape.
Click with the cornucopia on the colorbar.

Notice that a new color ar-rangement is created, using the colors you placed in the “warp” columns of the colorway. Color Scheme Selection A “scheme” is a set of rules which define how colors are selected from the colorway, and how the selected colors are assigned to individual threads.

Each copy of WeaveMaker comes with a set of color schemes built in. You can elect to use as many of these schemes as you wish. Through the Schemes window, you mark schemes as being eligible or ineligible (see “Schemes, turning on and off” in the Index for more on this topic). Each time you click with the cornucopia tool, WeaveMaker picks exactly one scheme from the list of eligible schemes, and uses that scheme to build a new color arrangement.

The individual scheme rules vary widely in complexity. A complete description of each scheme is given in Section 24: “ColorSchemes Catalog.”

Color schemes are enabled or disabled the same way weave structure schemes are enabled or disabled (see “Schemes, turning on and off” in the Index for more on this topic).

Scheme Colors
A scheme has to “know” which colors are available to participate in the new color arrangement. If you click in the warp color bar, the scheme responds by only using colors from the three “warp” columns of the colorway window. Similarly, colors from the weft columns are used to build weft color arrange-ments. The same color can appear in both the warp and the weft. Indeed, the same color can appear multiple times, for example, in both the Major and the Minor areas.

Color Emphasis
When building a color arrangement, the color schemes use lots of the “major” colors, less of the “minor” colors, and the “accent” colors are used sparingly. A great deal of control can be exercised over the color schemes by carefully considering how color chips are places within the six columns of the colorway window.

Blends
A “blend,” as performed by WeaveMaker, creates a gradual change of color across a series of threads, such that the eye is fooled into seeing one color fade into another color. A blend only involves two colors of dye (two yarn colors), but by carefully placing the colors within the fabric, a dithered color effect is created (just as a dot matrix printer uses a handful of ink colors to simulate a much larger range of colors).