Space Dyed Scarf

I love this scarf and it will stay on my neck most of the winter.  It's the first thing that I have woven AND dyed in the past 25 years and I am planning to dye more yarn for weaving this winter.  I took a class from Kathrin Weber at Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair in October, 2012 on space dyeing.  We dyed a couple of skeins of cotton and rayon and one warp.  One of the things I learned from the weaving is the importance of making the color changes every 6 inches or so, not every 12 inches.  To show the effects of the different colors, you need to have frequent color changes.  The other two skeins have longer distances between the color changes.  When weaving these, I think I will tie on the warp on in groups that allow the color to shift several inches, giving an ikat-like effect.  Here's one of Kathrin Weber's designs that utilize this technique.

This scarf was made with the warp I dyed during the class.  The drawback is that the warp was only 100 ends, 4 yards long.  I got one full sized scarf from the warp and a short scarf, only about 40 inches.  It might be long enough for my 6 year old grand-daughter to wear, or it could make a cool cover for my tablet.

Because I wanted it to be predominantly warp faced, I needed a pretty close set, 20 epi.  I only found that out after sleying the reed at 15 epi and finding that the colors on the warp were not as clear as I would like.  So took all the ends out of the reed and started over.  The only other issue with this warp is that at 100 ends, it would give me a scarf only 5 inches wide, so I added several stripes of blue chenille.  The chenille was also used as the weft, which resulted in some iridescence in the fabric.

Date Finished  December 2012

Loom  Schacht Baby Wolf

Weave Structure  Plain

Reed  10 epi

Warp Fiber  Rayon thick and thin

Count 

Color  White, then space dyed with Procion dyes - mostly blues and reds

Source Blazing Shuttles

Warp Fiber  Rayon chenille

Count  1450

Color  Blue

Mfr

Source Webs

Warp Width in Reed  6.5 inches

Ends  132

Length  4 yds

Weft Fiber  Rayon Chenille

Count  1450

Color  Blue

 Source  Webs

Beat Warp Faced

Size  6.5" by 66" plus fringe

 

Space Dying and the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair

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.