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.