Dyeing, and warp-painted jacket

Dyed the blouse (for a friend) last night and the linen yarn is in the dyebath as I type.  The blouse came out a little weird – the blue didn’t “strike” well and so the predominant shade is mauve.  I’m planning to overdye it with a weak blue solution to cant the mauve more towards the purple I was looking for.  Later today, most likely.  The linen yarn is looking beautiful – dark indigo – but I’m holding judgment until I see the rinsed-out, dry yarn.

I have thought some more about the jacket and I believe I’m going to make it warp-painted, in 2/12 silk and 2/7 Nm cashmere – it’s either that or rayon chenille, as that’s all I have in medium weight yarns suitable for a jacket.  (Well, I do have some mohair, but the resulting jacket would be unbearably hot indoors.)

Chenille would be beautiful but I’ve never worked with it before, so I want to get a shawl or two under my belt before attempting eight yards of carefully handpainted fabric, so I’m sticking to silk/cashmere.  I plan to handpaint the 2/12 silk warp in shades of magenta, purple, and rich indigo blue, carefully arranging it so that the color changes line up across the jacket horizontally.  For the weft, I think I will use black cashmere.

And for the pattern, I think I will use some kind of 16-shaft twill – which won’t be super-visible, but will add interesting texture close up.  Or, I might do a plain 3/1 twill, which would produce narrow diagonal stripes across the fabric.  I will probably weave samples for about 1/2 yard before going into the production run, to get an idea of shrinkage and also to look at different weave patterns.

I am also just about done with the white tutu – just need to put in the zipper, and add decoration.  I’m thinking some frilly pink ribbon and maybe an AIDS ribbon in the center, maybe not.  Whatever I pick, it definitely needs some jazzing up – right now it’s just an ocean of white.