My next warp is all reds.  Silk yarn, silk ribbon and eyelash cotton warp, handpainted in three different tones of red and orange. It is an all ablaze start to my summer weaves. For the weft I’m tinkering with silk straw from Alchemy and kasuri dyed black/grey tussah silk from Avril. I’m just getting on and weaving up the meterage and I’ll then decide what it wants to be for it’s woven up stage of life.

Dyeing is always an unexpected and pleasurable work for me. My method is a little ad hoc and experimental even though I have my sample book as a reference. This method doesn’t appeal to all but I find I get lots of dyeing done in this way. Otherwise I get too scared that the measurments or quantities of dyes won’t be right and I’ll do the most terrrible of activities – wasting time! All of my samples were dyed with Drimerene K fibre reactives but I’m now starting to build a reference with Procion dyes. These are all available from Kraftkolour.

The image here shows the dyed warp and the mix of yarns in it. I used a 12 dpi/5epc reed and threaded unevenly to compensate for the wider silk ribbon. I also tried to avoid a symetrical threading and placed the different yarns in a freer way within the reed. For example, the red silk ribbon wasn’t always next to a plain silk thread, but sometimes it was. It’s always ok to do this within a small area of the warp  and won’t make any difference to the wind on.