A bit of this and that......

Today I got the fringe twisted on the recently woven handspun yarn shawl. For some reason I can't get a good representation of the colors - it's much prettier than my photo looks.....and so yummy feeling.

I moved on to stenciling on two ice dyed silk scarves. Very simple, understated. A dragonfly on each end.

A sand dollar and starfish on each end of this scarf. I used Shiva Paintstiks, which I love, but they need a week to cure, then the paint gets set further by ironing. This looks much prettier in person.

The AVL is now ready to tie on the front beam - more gingko scarves to come. When I thread the heddles on the 40 harnesses I let the loom raise the next shaft so there's never an error in threading..........but when I reached harness 39 & 40 it refused to raise them. I was hoping there wasn't a major issue.....as there are too many of those in life this month......I shut it all down and restarted it, worked just fine for the rest of the heddle threading job....phew.

And a big failure this morning. I silkscreened three black chenille scarves with discharge paste. Two with gingkos, one with abstract designs. After the discharge paste dried I got the iron out to steam  the silkscreening which will pull the dye out. Nothing happened, nada, absolutely nothing. Sometimes depending on how a fiber is dyed it may not be effective but this is the same Silk City chenille I've used before so I know it works. Then I started wondering if there's a shelf life to discharge paste - I've had this gallon for a long time, and I'm down to the last cup. I did have a newer container, although not terribly new but it's never been opened so I got a little bundle of the chenille yarn to give it a try. It discharged. So, at some point I'll be re-silkscreening those scarves with the new container of discharge paste. So, yes, it has a shelf life. When I get in the mood to tackle this again I'll post photos.

Goings on in the studio

On Monday I wove a couple red chenille scarves. Yesterday I decided to silkscreen discharge paste on them to remove color. One scarf I used the silkscreen above which I bought from Marcy Tilton. The other scarf I used ginkgo silkscreens that I had burned myself. First step is to apply the gloppy discharge paste (bought from Dharma Trading) with a sponge brush. Then I let it dry.

Next step is to iron it and like magic the color disappears and ginkgos appear! I did do a sample first to see what color the red would discharge to - this golden color was perfect. In the past I had a purple that discharged to a very ugly orange, luckily I sampled that before doing the entire scarf.

 And here's the scarf today after washing and drying. When I wash rayon chenille I let it soak in soapy water, then rinse, then let it soak in water with some fabric softener. I hang it over a shower rod covered with a towel to dry, then when almost dry or completely dry I throw it in the dryer on low heat or fluff and it comes out drapey and soft as butter.....yum, butter.....

Yesterday afternoon I put this chenille warp on the loom. It's a soft lavendar and seafoam in the warp using a fibonacci striping sequence. Partway through the first scarf I wondered what would happen if halfway through I switched from the lavendar weft to the seafoam weft. It's really not as pronounced as it appears in the photo, it's very subtle. These scarves are hanging to dry right now, will really be able to see how successful this experiment was tomorrow morning. I thinking I'm going to like it so I've already pulled out some other colors to do more - very subtle color changes in the same value looks to work.

And here are those recent scarves that came off the loom, the faux ikat bamboo scarves. I'm not a very good photographer so I can't diagnose why sometimes when taking pictures of handwovens a weird moire look shows up - the scarves don't really look like that.