Nothing glamorous

Nothing too glamorous has been going on the last few days – I’ve started testing my process for dyeing with Cibacron F (fiber-reactive) dye on silk, have wound some of the skeins of 30/2 tencel/silk onto cones, and threaded up about 2/3 of the warp.   I hope to finish testing my dyeing process tomorrow, and the threading on Saturday.  This will allow me to start sampling, both in fiber-reactive dye and on the loom!

I’ve also done a few more drafts in Photoshop, mostly oriented around sampling.  The intent is to do 1″ squares, using four wefts, in each of the fourteen combinations of one, two, or three wefts on the surface, and see how the colors interact.  (I had planned for 2″ stripes, but rapidly realized that this would require weaving over 2000 picks, 28″ of weaving, just to get my sampler!)  There are lots of things I want to assess – sett, appearance, and “hand” being the top ones.  I’ve never woven taquete before, so this is a bit of an adventure!

And, just for pretty pictures’ sake, here is a Japanese crest (chrysanthemum I think) that has been colored in for a four-weft taquete:

The idea here is to use weft #1 for background, weft #2 for the black outlines, weft #3 for the purple petals, weft #4 for the blue center, and wefts #3 and 4 for the blue-violet petals.  I don’t have huge expectations as far as esthetics goes (I think it would look prettier with all the petals the same color), this is more an experiment with color blending in the wefts.  I might do a similar flower with five different colors in the petals, just to practice blending multiple wefts.