Playing in Textures

I've been looking at yarn colors to put into the tapestry woven aprons for the back porch and found there were too many to choose from. It then occured to me it may be better to only have one color - which meant some means of creating a texture to show the grout lines of the tile pattern. So I started playing and produced the following. At first I was working hard to produce a single line. I didn't find anything prominent enough until I tried a single line soumak from Kirsten Glasbrook's Tapestry Weaving book. That was great for horzontal, but was a fight in the vertical direction. I tried Steve Bremner's wirework, except I tried nylon fishing line. I still struggled with the vertical direction being as prominent as the horizontal.

Then it struck me to try a different texture for each block and elminate the grout lines. I found in Kathe Todd-Hooker's Tapestry 101 a number of variations on soumak. I tried those and think I've found 4 textures that will work. Enough so that I picked out one yarn color and ordered them from Norsk Fjord Fiber. (Can I put in anymore plugs???) With all the colors of the slate, I decided on a nice neutral gray! You'd be amazed how much of it ends up in my house! It only took a day and the yarn is here!

Before I plunge into those, I think I will do one more sampler with those 4 textures in part of the slate patterns just to make sure I put them together well. Any suggestions on generating texture are most welcome!