Experiment

I finished weaving the panel yesterday, and will be dyeing it this morning.  Here’s a pic:

(The colors will be more intense once it is fully painted.)

I don’t like the striations in this one.  They are now subtle enough and irregular enough that they look accidental, like a bad dye job, rather than something intentional.  To address this, I’ve quickly knitted and dyed another sample blank, which looks like this:

This blank was knitted with 75 needles, which is just a bit “off” from the length of a single pick (which I calculate to be about 70 needles).  This will guarantee that the striped blank will turn into horizontal stripes.  The striped painting of the blank (which produces the longest possible “runs” of color) will make those stripes more prominent.  (See this blog post from 2009 for another experiment I did using striped blanks.)

Notice the high contrast between the two colors used.  This is because I want the striping to show more clearly than it will in the finished piece (if I like it enough to use it in a full panel, that is!).  This will tell me the overall pattern that results; the real pattern, of course, will be subtler.

There are a few other technical issues with dyeing a striped blank – mostly on how to keep the sample from rolling back on itself, as the one above has clearly done – but I think I can solve that by using some pins and craft felt.  The only downside is that the blank will no longer be microwaveable, so I will either need to bake it in the oven or else put together a homemade steamer.

I see the sun is starting to come up, so it’s off to wet-finish and dye the woven panel!