The Last Hand Dyed Warp ~ 12 Shafts and 12 Treadles

The last  hand dyed warp I have is this 2/30 cotton.  I decided to try making a warp with fine white cotton to see how the cotton would take up dye. It started out as a mystery cone that I got at a guild sale. I had done a burn test on to see what the fiber was and it came up as cotton, but I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen when dyeing it.  The good news is the warp took up the dye beautifully and went from white to wine.

I had almost finished threading when I noticed that I had a lot of extra heddles left, turns out that I thought I had 400 threads but I only had 300.  I decided to rethread backwards so I could move the extra heddles back to the other side.  When I had finished rethreading I looked at my pattern and had the realization that I could have just dropped five threads off to balance the pattern without rethreading.  Oops!

As for weft, I only had a couple of choices that were the correct grist; if I am ever going to use this 2/30 cotton again I’m going to have to dye some of the yarn to use as weft.  The auditioned wefts, starting from the bottom are, a white cotton with shiny silver acrylic, a rose cotton, a pink cotton and the same cotton as the warp but undyed white.  The pink is the definite winner.

The 12 Shaft Advancing Twill draft has large diamonds and has quite a large repeat of 95 threads.  It is amazingly pretty and gives spots of weft, spots of warp and a definite diagonal.

The dye job for the warp wasn't perfect  and there are areas that are almost black and areas where the original white shows through but I think that it adds interest.  The ‘bad’ dye job is because I just drizzled the dye over the warp and worked it into the threads with my hands, I’m sure if I had immersion dyed the warp it would have covered the threads completely without any streaks.

How about this for luck?!  That is all the weft that I had left after I was done weaving the scarf.

As I was twizzling on the dining room table I looked up and saw that one of the Dalias in the flower arrangement matched my scarf! Ain't nature wonderful.

Here is the finished scarf.  It is really very pretty and I have the perfect jacket to go with it so it is going to be mine, mine, mine!

Final Garden Shot is a mass planting of Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii 'Goldsturm' (Black-Eyed Susan).  The plants line part of our front garden border and today they were at their best.