I took two half day workshops at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair, a beginning spinning class and a dyeing class taught by Kathrin Weber, aka
Blazing Shuttles. We space dyed yarns with Procion dyes, in skeins and in pre-wound warps. I am not not sure what I'll make with the skeins, but I love the colors. One of the skeins moves from blue to purple and the other has some great fall colors, including greens, gold, browns and a little purple thrown in. Space dying the warp, instead of skeins, means that the colors will stay in the same relative place and line up together in the warp. That won't happen on the skeins, they will look much more variegated, unless I measure out a warp in mutiples of the length of the skein. If I do that, then the warp needs to wound in a circle, not the typical beam to the cross and back again. Maybe I will get around to that, and maybe not.
Procion Dyes are good for plant based materials, cotton, rayon, silk and tencel. It was a pretty easy process, but I need to think and plan for color changes and color complements before I attempt this again. The other thing I need to do is make the color changes come sooner and not have 10-12 inches of one color before the change. I will definitely try this again and would love to take a longer class with Kathrin Weber, including weaving with these funky yarns. The required ingredients other than the dyes, are pretty simple -soda ash and Dawn detergent.
I took one other class at SAFF, a beginning spinning class. I am glad I took it, but decided I was not that crazy about spinning. However a spinning wheel would be a helpful tool in overtwisting yarns and for plying different yarns together.
The SAFF vendor display was almost too much, too many vendors, too much yarn, too many people. I didn't buy a thing, because it was just so overwhelming. I will definitely go back next year, maybe with a list of what I plan to work on next.
