Fiesta to Sherbet

That yarn that I thought looked overwhelmingly bright, like a Mexican fiesta, turned into a lovely rainbow sherbet when I wove it in twill blocks with an undyed weft. The colors are a bunch more muted in real life than they appear in the photo.

I wish I’d woven both with that weft. Instead I wove the second with a periwinkle weft. Jack couldn’t resist photo bombing this one.

Here’s how I decided to finish the fringe on that leno pima cotton scarf. I think it added a nice touch to a nice scarf.

Although I don’t have a photo of it, I decided to turn that rayon scarf with the problem fringe that turned yellow at the end into an infinity scarf. That way no yellow will show.

I’ve said it before about other towels and I’ll probably say it again about new ones, but I think these are my favorite ever kitchen towels.

I love their colorfulness. Is that a word? They make me smile just to look at them. I wish they’d made me smile to weave them. The natural cotton is soooo soft that it kept breaking warp threads near the selvedges. I wove 3, cut them off, and re-tied, thinking that might help. Then I wove the other 3. Still problematic. I am decidedly not proud of the selvedges on these towels, but I think they’ll be really thirsty. And I’m betting they sell regardless of their less-than-beautiful selvedges. But we all know wha happens when I say that.

Gotta get back to the loom now. Still cranking out work.

August 30th, 2016 | 

Where does it go?

Time, that is. The days, weeks, and months just fly by. Two weeks from today I’ll be at my next show. YIKES!!! Do I feel prepared? Um, no. Will it be fine? I’m sure. I’ve not done the Clothesline Festival before, and have heard such wildly mixed reviews from others that I have no idea what to expect from it. But I know what I expected from myself, and that was to at least mostly replenish my stock with the number of scarves, shawls, and other items I’d sold in July. I had two whole months!

Well, I’m not too close and now I have just two weeks. My goal was 9 shawls, 21 scarves, and several little items. Plus I’m completely out of my packing bags, which I sew from pillowcases.

So far I have 6 shawls, 7 good scarves and 3 not-good ones, and no little items. I don’t think I’ve done great planning. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent so much time dyeing yarn. Or making pants. Or taking photos, or blogging or figuring out why the contact emails on my website weren’t getting to me, or....what are those other things that eat up my hours?

I’ve already made some other decisions that may not have been the best, too, decisions that I’m too far into to change. I just keep telling myself that it will be fine. Maybe I can start to believe it.

So the photos in this post, from the top down – all warps are hand painted 30/2 silk:

snowflakes with royal purple rayon weft, same weight as the silk so the motifs are square, unlike the next two snowflakes with 20/2 lavender silk weft
snowflakes with 20/2 red-violet silk weft
watery silk with 20/2 ice-blue silk weft

watery silk with very fine (same weight as the warp) slate blue cashmere silk weft

August 27th, 2016 | 

Lather. Rinse. Repeat

That’s what my weaving life has been like today. Weave. Unweave. Repeat.

Last evening I wove about 4′′ of the watery silk warp with the green weft. Then I remembered that I already have an undulating twill silk scarf with this green weft. Plus the beginning selvedges were nasty. Plus 3 of my trusted commenters liked another weft.  So unweave all that.

I started again with the silvery blue weft. Much nicer. Got 4-5′′ woven and thought, since it was to have some vague representation of water, I’d try randomly varying the treadling, giving the whole thing some movement like water in a creek. Wov another 3+” and decided I hated that, so unweave.

Then I had to take a lay-down break. Some time yesterday I somehow pinched a nerve in my upper back. I’d taken some ibuprophen a few times, and it just needed to rest and be iced. So I did that.

Still, I got a little over half of the first scarf woven today. I am LOVING it!

Joelle asked for the weaving draft, so here it is for all.

August 12th, 2016 | 

Auditioning watery wefts

The watery hand painted silk is on the loom, and I’m trying out various wefts. The warp is 30/2 silk, with roughly 7,440 yards per pound (ypp). As a general rule I like my weft threads to be similarly sized to the warp. I don’t have much (any?) colored 30/2 silk so I tried a number of options.

From the bottom:

A rough tussah silk singles yarn in pale green with lots of nubblies, at 7,425 ypp . You probably can’t see anything but th nubs. I’ve had this yarn for almost 4 years now and have yet to find the right place for this yarn...this isn’t it.
Next up is a silk frise in navy. 7,425 ypp, but again, not the right place for it.
3rd trial is a silk-linen blend, in medium blue, but only 2,400 ypp. The color is ok, but I don’t like the size and the linen in 4th is 30/2 silk, at 4,900 ypp, in an interesting olive-y celery-ish green. I like it.

5th is 30/2 silk in a silvery-blue. A beautiful yarn, but too pale, I think.
6th is 30/2 silk in darker blue. This might be nice. Or it might be too dark.

Note that none of those wefts is packed/beat correctly. It’s hard to do that when there’s nothing solid to weave against. And I w fix the oddness on the left selvedge before I start weaving.

I’m going to stop auditioning here and weave the first scarf with the green. Once I see a bunch of it I’ll have a better idea how to silvery-blue and the darker blue might look, and if I need to try out other options.

We’re off!
P.S. If you’re a night owl, be sure to check out the sky tonight – the peak of the Perseids meteor shower.

August 11th, 2016 | 

Bravery

I don’t think of myself as a brave person. I certainly don’t apply the term risk-taker to myself. Yet I am a person who is willing, sometimes eager, to try new things, especially when guided by a knowledgeable, supportive teacher. That’s the case with my recent decision to try dyeing yarn at home.

When I took the first, and even the second, dyeing class at the Weaving & Fiber Arts Center, I told the teacher that I definitely would not be doing this at home. I was so sure that I didn’t keep her wonderful handouts from the first class, or even take a copy home with me from the second.

Hah! When I couldn’t fit her next 2 classes into my schedule, I ordered the necessary supplies, asked her for a copy of the handouts, and set out on my merry way, albeit with a bit of anxiety about screwing up.

The first step in dyeing a warp is to measure out the yarn you’ll be using, in the number of threads needed. Here I’m going directly from a skein of silk to my warping mill.

When I took the classes I simply guesstimated how many threads I’d need for some weave pattern that I’d later determine. This time I decided to figure out what pattern I wanted to weave first, then dye in colors that made sense for that pattern. Time will te if that serves me well.

First I wanted to weave an undulating twill that looked very watery, so I painted my silk warp in blues and greens.

Then I wanted to weave a modified snowflake pattern, and thought lavenders and blues would work well for that. Interestingly, when I mixed up the lavenders the color that I got on a white paper towel was most definitely not what I saw when I painted it on the yarn. Both the light and dark lavender started out as grey, and I was disheartened. After a bit of exposure (to air? to the soda ash activator? to the silk yarn?) the colors turned the purples that I was looking for.

For the third warp I decided to try overdyeing some very yellow rayon I had.

Since I was starting with such a dark yellow, I had to take that into consideration in the dye colors I chose. No pastels here, I figured. What I ended up with looks like a Mexican fiesta to me.

Anyway, when you do hand painting — and perhaps other types of chemical dyeing, too — it’s a long process. I worked non-stop on Saturday for 4.5 hours from getting out the supplies to cleaning up. And this was, of course, after I had done the planning an wound the warps.

Humorously, I wound warps the same length as those 3 warps of rayon chenille I wound for those six recent shawls. I didn’t stop to think that each warp was long enough for only 2 shawls, not the 3 that I usually do a warp, so each of my new warps is only long enough for 2 scarves. Maybe that’s all for the best. Had I wound each long enough for 3 pieces, it would have taken me much longer both to wind the warps and to paint them. My back had had enough on painting day, so I’m glad they weren’t each 1/3 longer. (Note to self: if I want to do longer warps in the future, I need to either raise the work table somehow or do fewer warps in a day.)

So after the painting was done I had to wrap up each warp individually and steam it to set the dyes. Then I had to let those steamed warps sit overnight to ‘batch.’ That brings us to mid-day on Sunday. That’s when I unwrapped and did a preliminary rinse on each warp, followed by an overnight soak to get all the dye possible into the yarn and minimize the rinsing time, energy and water needed.

Finally on Monday morning I could rinse out the yarn and see if I had followed the steps correctly so my warps would hold the color. Whew! I had! I set them outside on my drying rack to enjoy the breeze and dry, without dripping color on my floor or my bathtub. Here they are mostly dry.

That Mexican fiesta yarn is something else, isn’t it? If it were cotton I’d make towels out of it. Since it’s rayon I’m not sure what I’ do. It needs to grow on my a bit, I think.

I am a little disappointed, or maybe just surprised, at the colors in the middle warp, the one I planned for the snowflake weave pattern. The purples turned a most definite red-violet, much more red than I had in mind, or than what I saw when it was wet. I’ll probably still do the snowflakes with it...or maybe not.

I love the blues & greens for the watery weave, and hope that I can make my vision come to life with the correct wefts. I wonder I should custom dye them......

August 4th, 2016 |