today's long ride; warp painting colors

Today I went out and rode 45 miles in about 3.5 hours, which worked out quite nicely.  To be quite honest, I really shouldn’t be doing rides this long this soon, but if I want to be ready for Cinderella I don’t have much choice about pushing the pace.  Cinderella is only two weeks off, and it’s 65 miles!  I plan to have a relatively easy ride tomorrow (maybe 2.5 hours/30 miles, mostly flat) and then just bike to work the rest of the week.  I might do an hour or two on the trainer one of the weekday mornings.

Now, back to the interesting stuff.  🙂  I have picked out five colors for my AIDS Lifecycle painted-warp project.  Here they are:

(The colors did not come out quite right: the blue has a purple tinge, the purple is a clear rainbow purple, and the fuchsia is exactly the shade of a bleeding-heart flower.   I played with it a bit in Photoshop and still couldn’t get the colors right, so beware.)

The plan is to paint one set of warp stripes, maybe 1/3 of the warp, in blues, purples, and fuschia.  The other set of warp stripes, probably about 2/3 of the warp, will have the same plus orange and gold accents throughout.  I think that will produce a warp that is unified enough color-wise not to be muddy but bright enough to be interesting.

(Yes, I briefly considered making the colors the AIDS Lifecycle colors.  And if this were a short warp, I might just do that.  But what on earth would I do with twelve yards of turquoise-and-orange fabric?? These colors I can actually see wearing, either in a blouse or a shawl.)

Now I am going to go off and mix up the colors (along with a little sodium alginate to thicken the dye, so the color areas stay more distinct).  I will also chain up the warps (taking them off the kitesticks) and start them soaking in a soda ash solution.  Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m going to take the warp out and paint it.  Then I’ll go out on my ride, while letting the warp batch.  I’ll probably put it in a warm oven overnight, then
rinse it out first thing Monday morning.

B. comes back tomorrow, hurrah!  I’ve been missing him all week.