Painted Hand Spun Silk Scarf

This is one of my Hand Spun and Hand Painted silk skeins.  I painted half in dark teal and half red/purple; each section was about 50 inches long.

The skein was 101 inches long and so I measured it out on my warping board with the idea of making a warp while keeping the colour blocks intact.

I tried everything I could think of to make that happen…but no matter how I pulled the warp I was seeing stripes.  I found this great article on Weavezine, by Sine Mitchell and tried all the tips to no avail. I could have cut the skein in half and tied on each end individually, but that was just too much work for a scarf!  So I filed that idea away for another day and proceeded to warp as usual.

You can see how confused it all becomes when you make a ball out of it!

I wanted to use up the entire skein so I decided to pull the warp first and think about everything else once I knew how many ends I’d have.  This is hand spun silk that is close to 2/6 grist.  I ended up with 227 ends at 100 inches long.  Since the silk has been washed several times during the spinning and dyeing process; I knew there would be no shrinkage, so I decided to sett the scarf at 28 ends per inch ~ so this gives me a scarf that will be slightly wider than 8 inches.

Deciding on a pattern was the easy part of this process.  I love a free form pattern so I have dusted off my ever faithful 8 shaft advancing networked pattern because it shows the beauty of the painted warp extremely well.  This warp came out as thin ever changing stripes….I’m going with kinda good at this point, even though it wasn't what I'd hoped for!

Now the hard part for me begins….weft….yup the ever familiar, ever daunting weft choices.  I pulled out all of my 2/8 shiny stuff and started the process.

From the bottom it is Iris ~ I like this one,  Navy ~ dull, dull, dull, Red/Purple ~ this will give me a very red scarf, Brassards Navy ~ again dull; on the top is Amethyst ~ I like this one.

I wanted to see if any other blues would work so I decided to try again.  On the bottom is Blue Ming ~ this made the blue in the silk look grey, Aquamarine ~ this is just plain wrong, Red/Purple again and the winner is…..Iris which is shown on top.  Of all the colours this seems to make everyone around it look good.

I never did show you the final result of my ‘Purple Blot’ scarf (last blog post).  The pattering on this scarf is very subtle and although this photo doesn’t show it well, there will be some beautiful shimmer when it is finally pressed.  Here it has been washed and fulled but not pressed.

This shows both sides and it really highlights the reverse patterning.  Again, washed but not pressed.

I love to show what I’m growing in my garden and here is one of the medium sized ‘Fred’s Plum’ tomatoes….yup there are a few even bigger.  This is an amazingly huge tomato and it weighed in at over a pound….and it was tasty too!  We have a very small garden and to optimize the space I grew this tomato in a construction tube on the ground next to the fence.  The tube allows the roots to get warm and it helps direct the roots downward into what little soil we have.  We have about 1 inch of soil on sand then bedrock...not the best for a veggie garden!