What the heck has happened to Blogger??? This post took me 6 days, 2 computers, 3 browsers, 1 long distance phone call to a friend, 1 computer whiz and exiting and signing back in at least 30 times!
A few months ago I bought 400 grams of natural coloured 2/22 silk on eBay. After a few blocks of time in and out of my freezer, we are ready to add some colour!
In the past I’ve just skeined off hunks of silk willy-nilly, dyed it, and then tried to figure out the best way to use it. This time I thought I’d take a different and I hope a smarter approach and pre-made warps. The entire 400 grams made warps for 9 scarves, 8 have 182 ends and 1 has 145 ends and will need to be supplemented to get to scarf width.
Here we are set up in the garage on a nice warm August afternoon!
The warps are basking in soda ash solution while they wait their turn.
As we pulled the warps we secured them with Weft Twining so they would lay flat for painting.
Then it is simply a matter of using a foamy brush to put the dye on the silk. You can see step by step photos on my post
‘To Dye For’.
These are some of the reds and yellows, aren't they stunners.
These are the blues and greens.
You can see the Weft Twining on the far left that we used to keep the warps flat.
I hunted through my silk bins and found some handspun tussah about 2/5 size, some handspun 3/30 size that had been dyed in locks and ended up looking washed out after spinning and some 1/30 single silk that was an odd shade, so they too went into the pile. The final addition to the mix was 2 pink shibori scarves that Ngaire wove last March. Don’t they look great drying outside in the shade?
