Dyeing to start

I have now finished dyeing and winding all the skeins onto cones – 26 colors from red to golden yellow:

And here is the fuchsia to turquoise that I did awhile back:

Now I’m busily manufacturing paper pirns.  These are basically just paper quills, rolled around a ball-point pen.  I decided to experiment to see whether paper pirns would work after realizing that I would need 54 pirns just for this project!  At $2-3/pirn, that gets expensive fast.  And paper pirns work!  You have to be a little careful about winding the back end, and about keeping the edges smooth, but other than that it’s easy, fast, and cheap.  I will never buy another pirn again!

So now it’s time to start weaving.  I managed to get most of my loom woes solved, but not quite all.  I think I will mount a second mirror to see if I can catch the long floats as they happen, but I am not optimistic.  I will weave about another six inches of samples to see if it happens again, and try to debug it if it does.

I have also started work on my process testing for the dye study group…spent most of yesterday mixing up batches of dyebath, dye stocks, etc., and will be doing more samples today.  So far the results have been disappointing, but I am persevering.  Hopefully I will have results to show soon!