Thanks to my friend Nancy, who put me on to it, I now have a new-to-me Brother KH-830 knitting machine, purchased from a fellow who repairs knitting machines professionally.  It works much better than the antique I was using.

Of course, the first thing I did upon getting it home was knit up a sample.  (I am not obsessive.  Really I’m not.)  I knitted 600 rows at tension 0, using 70 needles, guessing that this would give me about 9″ of finished sample.  I’m pleased to say that my guess was only 5% off!  I wound up with 9.5″ of woven sample, so with just a minor adjustment, I’m good to go on knitting the “real” blanks.

I also tried for a more even color gradation, painting on the colors smoothly (instead of in blotches, which is what I did earlier).  I like the results:

There is still some striation (adding visual interest) but the overall color gradation is smooth.

So I think I am ready to embark upon weaving the remaining panels!

The one thing I have yet to determine is the color sequence for the dark panels.  I think once I have the brighter panels woven, I’ll experiment with draping the darker colors from those panels against each other, and against the yet-to-be-woven collar, to see what will work.

Off to knit up those blanks!

I painted the panel this morning, using an 0.5% solution of fiber-reactive dyes in various colors.  Here it is:

Here, by way of contrast, is what it looked like before painting:

It’s amazing how much white will “wash out” a color, isn’t it?

Anyway, I am still not happy with this panel.  The top half is okay, but the bottom half looks like a bad dye job.  And the results of my experiment are not encouraging:

What disturbs me here isn’t so much the striping as the consistency of the striping.  It’s very clearly inconsistent throughout the blank – so again, it will tend to look like a mistake, not something intentional.

All of which leads me to conclude that smooth, consistent color transitions are probably the easiest and best way to get consistency.  I have the feeling that minor color inconsistencies will give me interesting color variations anyway – and if there aren’t any, by all the myriad gods, I can put them there via dye painting, silkscreening, embroidery, or what have you.

So there.  (Nyah.)

Tomorrow morning I’m going to a guild meeting, and after that I’ll be headed over to Oakland, where a fellow who repairs knitting machines may sell me a more modern knitting machine to replace my semi-antique one.  Once I get back, I’ll probably use my new-to-me machine to knit another test blank, this time testing a smooth color gradation.  I have to do a test blank anyway to determine gauge on the machine, so might as well test the smooth color gradation while I’m at it!

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!

By weaving obsessively, I am nearly halfway through the panel; I expect to finish weaving today.  I have mixed feelings about it.  The color gradation is coming out smoothly – too smoothly for my tastes, I had been hoping for more striation.  This is the result of (a) moving to a row length that does not match the length of a weft shot, so the colors pool less, and (b) making the blobs of color narrower lengthwise.  I think for the next blank I will try to match the row length to the length of a weft shot again.

The blank is also coming out significantly longer than I had expected – I was aiming for 48″ but it seems likely I’ll wind up with something more like 54″.  This is a more serious issue.  Fortunately, I had planned for something like this: I can use this blank as the sleeve, where the variant length will be less noticeable.  Or I can use it as a “spare”.  Either way will work, I think.

Once I finish weaving it, I’ll need to overdye it.  Fortunately I can do this in parallel with knitting the next blank.

Here is a pic of the blank so far – hopefully you can see what I mean by lack of striation:

It’s there, but it’s very subtle, and probably won’t be visible after the blank is painted with fiber-reactive dyes.

I dyed the blank yesterday morning, and had planned to let it batch for 24 hours instead of heating it, to reduce the chance of felting.  That lasted until I realized I really didn’t have anything else to work on besides the blank.  Since I have virtually no ability to sit still, I sat around, flipped through a couple of books, etc. for about ten minutes and then said, “To hell with it!” and tossed the plastic-wrapped blank into the microwave.  I microwaved it in a sealed bag for 2-3 minutes, then let it cool for another 5-10 minutes (see previous comment about inability to sit still).  After 5-10 minutes it was still hot and I was completely out of patience, so I very carefully unwrapped it, wearing gloves so I wouldn’t burn myself, and extracted the blank very slowly and gingerly, allowing each section to cool before putting it into the warm rinse water.  Two rinses later, I pulled it out of the sink, squeezed out as much water as possible, and threw it into a 180 degree oven to dry.  Then I went to work on the Black Sheep Handweavers Guild website (which I had promised to revamp) so I wouldn’t be opening the oven every three minutes.

(People seem to think I’m patient because I work on extremely long-term projects.  The truth is that I’m not so much patient as focused – I can happily sit there for ten hours doing something repetitive if it gets me closer to my goal and is at least somewhat challenging – but ask me to sit still and you’ll rapidly find out how impatient I actually am!)

At any rate, twenty minutes and a good bit of foot-tapping later, the blank was dry.  Much to my delight, I found that it wasn’t felted at all, and only took two hours to unravel to this:

(The 2nd and 3rd from right pirns are in reverse order – the red should, obviously, be between the orange and the red-purple.)

I sneaked home at lunchtime and did a little weaving.  Here is the first half-inch:

I’m now at the 15-inch mark, and hope to finish weaving the panel early tomorrow morning.  It is a bit of an experiment, for a variety of reasons – so I’m eager to see how it comes out!