sweetgeorgia

Tangled up.

I’ve been making warps. Many many warps. Mostly because I have a lot of yarn lying around… naturally dyed, undyed, synthetically dyed, commercially dyed… omg, that’s a lot of yarn. Rather than using handpainted yarn throughout the whole warp, I’ve taken to mixing it up with a bunch of other solid coloured yarns.

The six-yard warp will end up as two 2.5 yard scarves or shawls (I haven’t decided… there’s still a lot of handpainted yardage remaining that I want to use up)… each one will be woven with a different coloured weft.

The bamboo was dyed in a pot with a bunch of other fibres and took on so much less dye. The dye pot was a mix of cutch, cochineal and iron in various combinations with silk and bamboo in the pot. I probably wouldn’t wear any of these colours on their own, but optically blended together, they become more interesting. The weft will likely be plain undyed bamboo, and then the whole piece will go back into the dye pot. Maybe more cutch. We’ll see.

Finally, this is the silk yarn that came out of the same pot. Unplied DK-weight silk yarn to be woven with some 2-ply cutch-dyed silk yarn… it might be overwhelmingly cutchy brown. Hmm. But luckily everything can be overdyed and re-worked. In fact, I dropped a small plain weave silk sample that I wove last year into a cochineal dye pot earlier this week… and you know, I LOVE it. Multiple dyes, overdyes, piece dyeing… I want it.

Done.

During a quick visit with Irene last week, I picked up a big ol’ ski shuttle from her and finished off my Boheme Blanket. Just a couple hours of uninterrupted weaving time allowed me to complete the yardage, hemstitch the ends, full and brush the whole blanket. Similar to Michelle’s GBGB, this blanket measured 41.5″ x 84″ before fulling and 36.5″ x 69″ after fulling in the washer.

There was a bunch of warp ends that didn’t make it into this particular blanket and so I’ve tied them onto the loom already, randomly spacing them out. I’ve dyed more Briggs & Little wool in dark brown which will fill in the gaps. I like to think of this next blanket as the sister blanket to the Boheme Blanket. It’ll be brown overall with the mohair and warp in dark brown… the leftover warp from the Boheme blanket will lend a couple flashes of fuschia in the midst of all that brown… Kind of like when you take a chunk of bread dough and save it to incorporate with the next bread baking session. The subsequent loaves have more depth, more flavour, more maturity… Taking a chunk of one warp and distributing it into the next blanket might be a little haphazard, but I like to think of it as growth and learning as subsequent projects unfold.