Preparing for dyeing.......

Yesterday I spent hours at the warping board winding warps for painting/dyeing. Today I'll probably spend a few hours winding more of them. So far they've been tencel or rayon/cotton blends. Then they'll all be sitting in the queue for the morning I wake up and decide to start dyeing.

Generally the only ties I put on a warp are at the beginning and end of the warp and the cross no matter how long that warp may be. (I don't advise skipping choke ties for the beginning weaver)  But, when I'm winding warps for dyeing I tie the bejeezees out of the warps to keep any tangling from happening. This warp will be soaking in a soda ash solution for a bit, wrung out, laid out to paint the dyes on, sit overnight to batch and then it needs to be rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed to get the excess dye out. That's a lot of handling and moving around - if I didn't put any ties on it I'd end up with a tangled mess.......ask me how I know this........and it only has to happen once...........

When dyeing for scarves I generally only wind enough for 2 or 3 scarves. Even though weft color choices can change up how each scarf looks I still don't want too many to be from the same dyed color schemes, I want this to be more of one of a kind scarves. This is tough for someone who generally puts on long warps but I'm much happier in the end if I don't have more than 3 scarves from the same color schemes.

I moved my warping board into the room with the tv so I could watch Reign (about Mary Queen of Scots) on Netflix only to find that I couldn't get a good connection to the internet - ack. I'm up to episode 38 of 44. This room is the furthest from the router/modem, sometimes it's fine, sometimes not. So, I ended up listening to a book on CD instead.

Toward the end of the day I wound a few 5/2 perle cotton 'warps' to be used on the inkle loom - they will be very fun painted/dyed and then mixed with solid colors for bookmarks. One of them I even took the time to tie up for ikat dyeing.  Hmm, maybe some dyed warps for table runners would be fun - they could also be mixed with solid colors.

My goal before the summer is over is to dye enough warps for weaving this fall and winter. It's so much easier to do my dyeing outside, I'm just not set up for inside dyeing other than a small dye job here and there.