I had purchased this cotton slubby yarn at a guild swap/sale, peach is a really good colour with my skin tone, and I’ll use it up no problem. Yeah, right! Now it’s one of those bulky items that clutter my stash.
I use paint chips gleaned from my favourite paint store to check out colour ways.
It seems like peach and khaki would work nicely for a cool knitted summer sweater, so that’s my plan.I purchased a beginner Procion MX Dye kit last summer – all the basics except the salt and the gloves came from Maiwa in Vancouver BC for under $30.00.
I wound the yarn onto my trusty Japanese plastic skein holder. I do have a fancy wooden LeClerc skein holder, very pretty to look at but I find it a bit heavy to work with, so this is my 'go to guy'.
The skeins are made, it’s time to soak for 30 minutes in the Soda Ash bath.
After wringing the yarn out very well, it’s time to paint, no real plan here, just trying to make all 5 skeins pretty much the same. I protected my surfaces with heavy duty plastic and placed each skein on plastic food wrap.
Mixing the dye was a breeze, just a teaspoon of dye, a teaspoon of urea, a tablespoon of salt and enough water to mix, about 1/2 cup.
After dabbing the dye on with a sponge brush we're all done and have it wrapped up for 24 hours, then rinse and dry on a rack.
Not sure what happened here, I followed the formula to make khaki and it did include some turquoise. Now that everything is dry it looks like the turquoise migrated out of the khaki…..not too sure about this, looks weird to me!
Can't belieive I’ve made CAMMO!!!……but now that I’ve knit a swatch, I like it. Just goes to show that for a slap dash dye gal like me, everything is unpredictable!
Found some fine cotton that was Ecru and bought at a yard sale….yukky then and pretty now!
We were on a roll. I raided my stash for a couple of other geriatric items. A white cotton flake would look good in scarlet, blue and purple. Ngaire painted these ones.
They turned out very well and what was expected, except (isn’t there always an exception!) the core yarn must have been synthetic and not noted on the cone. It’s come out very lightly dyed.
Michael would be home soon, so playtime's almost over. We tossed all the blue, red, and fuchsia dye into a big container, added enough water to cover the yarn and immersed some rather poopy looking brown cotton. Anything would be better than that colour, I like it now!
The lease sticks have to be tied onto the upper part of the beater initially to allow the warp to wind on. Again, I must have some weird difficulty wish because I used very sticky 2/10 Egyptian cotton. It clumps together like Velcro! 
The Jane has another nifty doodad. It's a clear piece of plastic mounted on each side of the loom. When the beater is not being used, these little things keep it locked back out of your way, this allows another inch or two weaving space. I'm sure this will come in handy with finger manipulated weaves, when you need to have hand space to use your pick up stick etc.
After I tied onto the front beam, I had tails of about 5 inches from the knots and as I had allowed for a ten inch fringe I need to ‘save’ some of the warp by weaving in the four Venetian blinds. The brown wool that is packed in next is acting as hem stitching, so that when I take the weaving off the loom it will not unravel before I have a chance to twizzle the fringe.
While weaving Bead Leno the twist made in the warp threads is quite noticeable. But when looking at the beads themselves during the weaving action there is no discernable twist.
Weaving Bead Leno was absolutely bliss. I was only working with two treadles so I always knew where I was in the pattern. But the best bit was that every single time I passed the shuttle under the shed I could see the pattern, so as long as I was paying attention I could see if the pass was correct before I had to beat it in. It was a great bonus because I could pay more attention to how I was sitting and to where I was grabbing the beater bar; I have a bit of a bad habit of grabbing the sides of the beater not the middle. By the time that I had finished the scarf, I was a lot better if not cured.
As I was getting close to finishing weaving my scarf I was getting more and more excited to see the finished product. But as I was advancing the warp for what I thought was the second to last time, I ran into a little problem. My warp extenders were too short, I had this problem with my last scarf and had made new extenders but I must have mixed the new and the old ones together and well . . . I had to unweave a little bit so I could finish the scarf by putting in the little bit of tabby and the brown wool. I have now made sure that I will not have this problem again but in the photo you can sure see the difference in length between the extenders!
Finishing the scarf only involved twizzling the fringe. To do that I had to cut away the brown wool in sections and using the nifty twizzler twizzle away.
Here are some photos of my finished scarf
I started to pull my threads on the warping board and was getting into the rhythm then I realized that I am using a loom that has a sectional back beam – oops too many threads. A sectional back beam breaks the warp down into 1 inch segments that get wound on separately. I forgot and pulled nearly twice as many threads that I needed to and had to do some unwinding but it made a good excuse to stop and take a photo!
When I was dressing the loom I was a little naughty – I didn’t use the tension box which you are supposed to for a sectional back beam. I choose not to because the warp is short, only enough for one scarf, and because I had a helper, Mum, to wind the beam while I put tension on the warp. There are extenders added to the back beam to help in the lessening of the loom waste; they reach to the back of the heddles.
One of the tricks that Mum shared with me was to put something under all the shafts to raise the heddles making them closer to eye level, in my case two yellow ceramic rectangular containers were used.
Now the fun bit threading the heddles and adding the beads. I gave the instructions a brief look and was away to the races. The beading is based on four warp threads, with the bead being on only two threads but all four threads in one dent in the reed. I used large white glass pony beads but did not have enough so had to use some smaller black glass bead by the edges. After sleying the reed and tying up to the front beam, I tried out the shed and saw that the threads were getting tangled and it seemed like the white beads were too heavy while the black beads seemed to be OK.
So I went back and re-bead the warp again with the smaller black beads and resleyed the reed and tied to the front beam. I checked the shed again and the beads were still tangling up together so I went back and checked every thread to make sure that everything was perfectly straight, no twists no nothing. It was perfect.
Tried to weave and something was not right, half of the threads were just laying there. I had my Mum come over and look but she got a phone call and so as I waiting for her to finish I looked at the instructions again and soon realized that I had placed the beads completely wrong! They were on the wrong threads and they did not have the twist added. I could not believe that I had done this, so for the fourth time I had to re-bead the warp. This time I had the book beside me and so I finally did it right! In the picture it is a little hard to see the twist but trust me it is there.
So after this little adventure I decided to take a little break and blog about my experience before I start to weave. This was a good choice because I was a little miffed at myself but now with cathartic release of the tension I am ready to start weaving.
The Maurice Brassard tencel is not quite as shiny and seems a tiny bit thinner with 18 twists per inch and feels a little rougher.
Seems to me that the Brassard tencel didn’t move around as much. Sorry about the bathroom photos, but it was the best light in the house today.
I decided to press the selvedge flat and to leave the centre alone. This caused some problems with the weft moving yet again…this was a bit unexpected because I thought that the washing and drying would have locked the weft in place! Yeah, no!
