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More painted-warp cape dye samples

I’ve now done a few more sets of yarn samples for the painted-warp cape, testing out a few more dye approaches for the double weave warps. I started by trying the fuchsia/orange/yellow and deep indigo blue idea, dyeing these three skeins:

Three skeins of yarn, dyed in fuchsia/gold, fuchsia/orange/gold, and navy or indigo blue.
Fuchsia and Gold, Fuchsia/Orange/Gold, and Deep Navy skeins

The top skein is dyed using Fuchsia and Golden Yellow MX fiber-reactive dyes; the middle skein is dyed using Fuchsia, Soft Orange, and Golden Yellow. The bottom skein is dyed using Strong Navy. (All names are Dharma Trading Company (Procion) MX fiber-reactive dye names.)

What’s interesting about the top two skeins, if you look closely, is that Fuchsia and Golden Yellow strike about equally well on cotton and silk – there’s no difference in darkness in the threads in the top skein, which is only Fuchsia and Golden Yellow. But in the middle skein, which contains Orange as well, there is a noticeable difference in the areas that are orange – the strands of silk yarn (the shinier strands) are lighter, suggesting that the orange dye either absorbs or binds preferentially to the cotton yarn.

You can view this differential dyeing as either a fault or a positive trait. Or both. I happen to like it in the fuchsia/golden yellow/orange skein, and in the dark blue skein below it (where the silk strands are noticeably lighter than the cotton strands). However, it’s dreadfully inconvenient in this green sample, where I wanted different intensities of a single shade of forest green:

Green skein showing differential dyeing - some yellow and some blue-green areas

As you can see, I wound up with strands of pale yellow-green and bluish moss green instead, because the yellow and blue component dyes struck differently on the silk and cotton. (There’s no such thing as a “pure” green dye, alas.) The result is a gorgeous skein of yarn – that is not at all what I wanted.

I solved the green dye problem by doing what Ian and Teresa (and perhaps a few other people) recommended a few blog posts ago, and overdyeing. I dyed the top skein in the photo below variegated dark blue two blog posts ago; now I’ve overdyed it with gold. Now it’s a lovely dark forest green, with some subtle variation in color – but not nearly as much as the skein below, which was simply painted with green (blue + yellow) dyes in a single pass.

dark green skein on top, variegated yellow and medium green skein on bottom

Of course, neither skein is “right” or “wrong”; they’re both attractive color combinations, and both could create beautiful projects. However, the top skein is much closer to the effect I’m looking for, so I will paint one warp blue and then overdye it to get mottled forest green.

And the second warp?

I was not really happy with the combination of fuchsia/orange/yellow and dark blue. I’ve been working with that color combination for quite some time, and this time it didn’t “sing” to me.

Fortunately, I had decided to try another skein of fuchsia and green, this time using Golden Yellow instead of Sun Yellow. This was for technical reasons. Sun Yellow is a weak mixing color, meaning that it takes a LOT of Sun Yellow to shift either red or blue noticeably from its original color. So here’s the first skein, where green + fuchsia produced purple:

One of the things that happened (I think) was that the Sun Yellow simply got overpowered by the blue and the fuchsia dyes, resulting in purple and fuchsia. Golden Yellow is a MUCH stronger mixing color, and better able to hold its own against other colors.

Anyway, the next skein came out beautifully. Here it is, with the first skein (the one that produced fuchsia + purple) below it, for reference:

two fuchsia-and-green skeins, dyed differently

The first skein has much more subtle color variation, and much less dramatic differences between the threads. It looks much more unified than the other skein.

I think that’s because I applied just enough blue dye that – in the darker threads – the blue dye is the same darkness as the pink threads. I’m not going to go into all the color theory, but keeping the colors similar in darkness means they will blend together visually.

At any rate – I had eyeballed the dye mix for that particular sample, so the next step was to mix up dyes for another set of skeins using much more rigorous (aka, reproducible) measurements. Out came the digital scale and the measuring syringes. And here are the two final samples:

third set of fuchsia and green sample skeins

The top sample uses about 1/3 more blue than the bottom sample, so produces a cooler green. (The bottom skein looks more yellow on my screen than it does in real life; the top skein looks bluer than it ought. I could write reams about color inaccuracy in digital photos, but perhaps another time….)

I like the bottom sample better, so will be using that ratio of dyes.

The next step will be to test what my dye application method does on an actual warp. To dye the skein, I simply spread the skein out, dabbed bits of green dye on it, filled in the undyed areas with pink dye, flipped it over, and did the same on the other side. This produced what appeared to be unified areas of color. BUT – I don’t know whether those areas would continue to look unified if the dots and dabs were put into a warp. How would the threads rearrange themselves? How big would the areas of color be? What would it look like once woven?

Interesting questions. I don’t know, and I would like to know before dyeing, beaming, and tying on a monster 2,640-thread warp (20 yards long!).

Since Maryam is tied up with a different project, I’m arranging to borrow my friend Alfred’s Louet Jane table loom, so I can wind, dye, and put on a short warp, weave a little bit, and see what happens.

Stay tuned….

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Chocolate and cows

Or, how I spent my Easter weekend…

First, the chocolate. (Because chocolate is so much more fun than cows!)

You may recall that awhile back, I made myself some low-sugar chocolate. Well, predictably, Jamie hoovered up most of the low-sugar chocolate, and after it ran out, asked me to make more. So I ordered another 6 kg of Valrhona’s Alpaco (my favorite flavor of their line), 3 kg of unsweetened and 3 kg of their 66% cacao solids. Over the weekend, I mixed 1 kg of each, tempered it, and made some 83% Alpaco chocolate. It’s very intensely chocolate, and low-sugar enough that I can eat it in small doses without feeling too bad about it (my blood sugar is, fortunately, very well-controlled). And, mixed with nuts and dried fruit, it’s even tastier!

Here’s what I made. First, plain chocolate bars. Here they are in the molds:

chocolate bars, still in molds

These are the heavy-duty, rigid polycarbonate molds used by professional chocolatiers. I’ve tried the thin, flimsy plastic molds sold to home cooks and I don’t know how anyone can succeed with them – they drive me crazy. So when I got rid of all my other molds I kept these four back, just in case I wanted to make bars again someday. I’m glad I did!

And here are the bars, unmolded:

Finished chocolate bars

They’re not absolutely perfect – they have a slightly matte finish instead of a high sheen – but that may be partly because of the high cocoa content, as the unsweetened chocolate doesn’t have as much cocoa butter as a couverture does. I’m not entirely sure about that. Doesn’t matter; they look quite good and will taste even better!

Here’s the peanut gianduja (aka: peanut butter mixed with chocolate, like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, only much much better). Technically it’s not a gianduja as it contains no powdered sugar, but don’t tell anyone!

peanut gianduja with raisins

The front part contains “regular” (unsulfured) raisins, the middle golden (sulfured) raisins. The back part is plain peanut gianduja, and very tasty it is.

And here is the cherry almond chocolate:

Dried cherries and roasted almonds mixed with chocolate

This is still in what I consider the most glorious stage of chocolate: when it hasn’t quite fully set, and is a little matte in sheen. I don’t know why I find this moment in chocolatiering so beautiful – perhaps because it is so transitory. It lasts only a minute or two. The chocolate goes from a liquid, translucent shine to the hard, waxy sheen you see in chocolate bars. But in between is this soft, matte glow that I just love. It says, “The chocolate is tempered perfectly, and will come out great.”

For those who have dyed with indigo, it’s like that magical transformation from the yellow-green of antifreeze through beautiful shades of aqua to pure indigo blue, after you take the fiber out of the dyebath and the pigment oxidizes. It’s wonderful to see.

Meanwhile, about the cows…Um, yes, the cows. Actually, only about a quarter of a cow. I hope, anyway.

I’ve wanted a chest freezer for quite a few years. I like making big batches of food because it’s more efficient, but of course the freezer is only big enough to hold 1-2 two-gallon batches of soup or chili. A bigger freezer would allow me to do a bigger variety of foods, so I can still cook efficiently without having to eat chili for two weeks straight.

But for a variety of reasons, we never quite got around to getting a chest freezer.

Then the coronavirus hit. And the idea picked up some urgency.

I will admit to being both a gourmet and a pessimist. I buy my meat at the farmer’s market, and what with social distancing and the throngs that usually populate the farmer’s market, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before they either shut down the farmer’s market or shopping at the farmer’s market becomes completely untenable due to long lines etc.

Plus, supply chain issues may become a problem. There have already been reports of meat packing plants having problems with workers getting sick. My guy doesn’t get his meat processed at a big meat packing plant, but there’s nothing to prevent the workers at his place getting sick either. And while I’m sure I could live without meat if I needed to, I happen to like grass-fed beef, it’s better for the environment than corn-fed beef, and I REALLY don’t want to support factory farming.

So…a chest freezer and a bulk meat purchase seemed like a good idea. I called him up, and it turns out that I can get a quarter cow for $5.50/lb hanging weight. Hanging weight is the weight of the steer when they hang up the carcass for dry aging, right after it’s been slaughtered. In this case, I asked for the smallest steer they had, which turned out to be 600 pounds. So that was 150 pounds of meat.

That’s still a LOT of meat for two people, but it turns out that you lose about 40% of the weight during the dry aging and butchering process, so it will work out to about 90 lbs of actual meat. I’m asking for bones + offal (all the stuff they’ll give me, anyway) so I might get a bunch more – we’ll see.

Anyway, we have a 7 cubic foot chest freezer (I had to exercise my Google-Fu and then call all over town to get it – apparently everyone and their kid sister wants one right now too, for the same reasons I want one!), and the quarter-cow will take up about half of it. I’d make a crack about the dead bodies taking up the other half, but since I quit my job as a project manager, I don’t need to dispose of dead bodies any more! 🙂

Now, of course, if you have a quarter-cow in the freezer, plus a quarter-freezer’s worth of cat treats that must not get stale (because priorities!), you have to organize it all. Dumping a hundred packages of beef into a freezer at random is a recipe for chaos. My tentative plan is to file the quarter-cow neatly into canvas tote bags, classified into steaks, roasts, ground beef, and so on. Using tote bags will make it easier to haul stuff in and out since tote bags (unlike cardboard boxes) come with handles. Wire baskets might be better, but I don’t have wire baskets to fit the chest freezer and am wary of scratching up the interior.

Of course, you then have the problem of differentiating a sea of identical canvas tote bags.

I bet you can guess where this is going…

Yep! I spent part of yesterday tie-dyeing canvas tote bags so I could differentiate frozen cow body parts:

The colors aren’t the most brilliant, but I was dyeing with the colors I was using for the dye samples for the double weave cape, and I was dyeing on an off-white canvas base. But I’m happy with the results anyway – I will certainly be able to tell them apart in the freezer!

And, with that, I’m off to other things. I’ll update you on the latest set of yarn samples once they’re dry.

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More samples for Seasons of Creativity

I’ve been working like crazy on Seasons of Creativity – so crazy, in fact, that I haven’t had time to post. The deadline is now just 3.5 weeks away, and I’m just starting to weave the next set of samples. Whew! It’s going to be close. But I’m pretty sure I can do it.

Here’s the one-photo summary of what’s happened to date:

Seasons of Creativity - second sample progress photo (wound quills, samples, shuttles)
Seasons of Creativity – second sample set

Top left: one of the four sets of laboriously painted wefts. These were knitted into blanks of precisely calculated length, hand-painted in a meticulously chosen set of dye colors, carefully unraveled onto quills, and labeled with the correct ordering. Top right is the four shuttles, each labeled with the number of the weft and the quill that ought to go into it, so I don’t accidentally weave out of order. (There are actually five shuttles, but the fifth shuttle doesn’t have a painted weft and I couldn’t fit it into the photo, so I left it out.)

Bottom, of course, is the samples I’ve been weaving. Here I’ve been working on the leaves. I’m testing a number of things simultaneously: the number of picks per inch, the imagery, and the leaf and background colors. I’d prefer to be able to test all these things separately and in more detail, but I don’t have time, so I’m kind of experimenting with everything at once.

Here are some of the concerns I’m grappling with.

First, I’m in uncharted territory, dye-wise. I have 1500 dye samples, which are sort of useful in telling me generally what color I’ll get if I mix Color X with Color Y. However, they aren’t useful in telling me what concentration of dye I need to get a particular shade, because the dye samples were done in an immersion dyebath and I am painting on dyes. Unfortunately, concentration of dye is critical information – it’s the difference between pale gray and black, the difference between spring green and forest green. So I’m having to “wing it” based on my experience and looking at the dye in the bucket as I’m mixing it, both of which are pretty unreliable. I’m having to settle for keeping meticulous records so I know what to change next time. It’s making me very nervous about whether I can get it right the second time.

Second, I won’t have time to do a third set of samples to refine the color contrast of the background against the leaves and butterflies. So far I like what I’m seeing in the samples, but I’d really like to weave the whole piece, evaluate what I see, and then make adjustments and weave a second piece that will be better. I’m not going to have time to do that, unfortunately. So I will have to do the best I can on the first try. I think it will come out pretty good, but I’d feel better with enough time to do a revision. C’est la vie.

Having said all that…the second sample is GORGEOUS. Here’s a closeup:

close-up photo of the second sample
close-up photo of the second sample for Seasons of Creativity

The small photo really doesn’t do the sample justice, though. Actually, neither does the larger photo. The background is rich brown-black flecked with purple-brown and metallic gold, the yellow-green leaves have just a touch of iridescent/metallic glitter, the brown leaves are a mix of reeled silk and mercerized cotton and so have some nice glossy sheen. The photo doesn’t pick up the glitter at all. It’s gorgeous in person.

Here’s a photo of the two samples together:

photo of both samples of Seasons of Creativity
both samples for Seasons of Creativity

One of the things I’m trying to decide is whether to weave Seasons of Creativity with a painted-weft background that changes colors or with a black background. The stark black background on the far left for the butterflies doesn’t appeal to me, but the one on the far right (slightly sparkly with a metallic silver weft) does. The rich brown-black background for the leaves in the top of the photo looks beautiful in person but washes out the leaves in photos (which is important when submitting for juried shows). Similarly, the blue-weft section (second from the left in the photo) in the butterflies looks beautiful, but I think it distracts from the butterflies.

At this point I am thinking I will stick with the colored backgrounds, but I may weave a section of leaves with a black background just to see which I like better. I wish I had time to explore more options!

Now, some technical explanations, since someone asked how knitted blanks work. I unfortunately didn’t take photos (and honestly don’t have time to explain) to show all the details of how knitted blanks work, down to the knitting machine, but the basic ideas is that you knit a long rectangle of fabric, then dye it, then unravel it again to use in weaving (or knitting, or whatever you want). This allows you to use fancy dye techniques while keeping the yarn orderly.

I knitted the blanks on a standard-bed knitting machine, a Brother KH-830. This is a fancy machine that will take punch-card patterns to do all sorts of fancy patterns, but all I’m using it for is stockinette stitch, so a simpler machine would work just as well. The yarn is a collection of various very fine yarns that together work out somewhere around 20/2 cotton in weight.

I knitted some short blanks, wove some samples, and calculated exactly how many stitches are required for a row that is precisely equal in length to one pick of weft. In this case, it’s 84 needles at a stitch size of 1. This calculation isn’t strictly necessary, but it does make things easier later.

I then knitted a set of blanks, one set for each painted weft, at stitch size 1. To help keep track of where I was in the blank (for dyeing purposes), I added two marker rows at stitch size 7 every 50 rows (the machine counts rows for me), and every 100 rows I added a stripe of waste yarn because I planned to start a new quill (bobbin) every 100 picks. This would help me keep the colors in sync – every 100 picks I discard all remaining yarn on all four quills and start fresh with new ones. So any length differences wouldn’t accumulate and cause problems. Since 100 picks’ worth of yarn is about all I can fit on the teeny-tiny quills that I can fit into the Swedish shuttles that go through the small shed on my loom, this works perfectly.

So the blank looks like this:

a section of knitted blank for Seasons of Creativity
a section of knitted blank for Seasons of Creativity

The irregularity in the center (the area of larger stitches) is the marker rows, and the black areas are the waste yarn that I put in every 100 stitches. This blank has already been painted, of course.

Most of the blanks consist of multiple yarns knitted together. Some are all silk, but some are a combination of silk and cotton. That was an experiment – I expected the yarns to take up the dye differently, and in fact they did:

knitted blank with different dye take-up between silk and cotton
knitted blank with different dye take-up between silk and cotton

The difference looks pretty shocking, but I can’t wait to see how it weaves up – I think it will result in some very interesting-looking leaves. The colors will even out a lot through optical mixing when woven, so the result will be a textured single color.

Here is a photo of all the blanks before unraveling:

all the knitted blanks
all the knitted blanks

It took nearly 8 hours to unravel them all. (Would have been faster if I hadn’t had to sneak around the feline bosses. Good thing they nap all afternoon!)

I can’t believe I didn’t take photos of the wound quills! I’ve already used two of them but I’m going to take photos of the rest as soon as I finish this post. I need them for my records, but I’ll also post them here.

The good news about my sample is that it’s weaving up at 120 picks (threads) per inch, not 160-200 as I had originally guessed. That’s a relief! It means Seasons of Creativity will be only about 6000 picks long, which is much more manageable than the 10-12,000 I had been anticipating. I can weave that in about 15 hours. I might have time for that second try after all.

Off to weave more samples!

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Painted warp samples

Sorry for the long silence! I’ve been prepping for a longish vacation – nine days visiting friends and family on the East Coast. Just finished four days visiting my best friend Edouard in New York City, and now en route to Maryland for another five days with family. I’ll return home Thursday.

Since I’ve had quite a bit of travel time, I’ve been spending some of it finishing up the painted warp samples for my upcoming talk at ANWG. The challenge was showing how warp and weft colors interact to produce the finished cloth – particularly when the colors aren’t solid, and I’m using multiple structures in the same swatch.

Fortunately, I always dye a few extra warp threads when painting a warp to make repairs easy, so I had a bundle of eight or nine leftover warp threads when I was done weaving. I tacked them down at the boundary between weave structures, and ran a bundle of weft threads across the swatch to show the weft colors. Like this:

painted warp swatch with a bundle of warp threads running vertically and a bundle of weft threads running horizontally
painted warp swatch

I think this shows off the warp and weft colors nicely, and the swatch shows how they weave up together, both in a complex design and in a simpler one.

This particular (8-shaft) draft blends colors quite a bit. I’m doing another set of samples that uses the same threading and the same colors, but a VERY different tie-up that keeps the warp and weft colors largely separate. It will produce a vastly different look. The point here is that people often focus on the color palette, when structure is just as important. The color palette determines what color blends are possible, but structure controls what color blends actually appear, and what blends appear in which area.

I wove a surprisingly large number of samples on this warp. It was a 14-yard warp, and I got 32 samples out of it. I’ll be doing another 32 samples in an identical color palette using the other structure, which – added to the 20-odd samples that Laura Fry already wove for me – will give me about 80-90 painted warp samples for my seminar. I plan to weave another 50-60 for the online course I’m developing, but not until I get back from ANWG.

Here (purely for the eye candy) are a few more painted warp samples:

painted warp swatch in pinks and purples
painted warp swatch with dark blue mottled warp and pale pink weft
mottled blue painted warp with pale blue weft

The last two swatches demonstrate the interplay/trade-off between woven pattern and dyed pattern. In the blue swatch with pale pink weft, the high contrast between warp and weft makes the woven pattern quite prominent. So you don’t see much of the pattern dyed into the warp; it becomes a textural background to the pattern woven into the cloth.

In the blue swatch with the lighter blue warp, the warp and weft have much less contrast, so the pattern dyed into the warp is much clearer. But you can still see structural effects. The dyed pattern is much clearer in areas where the woven pattern is simplest. At top right, the simple zigzag makes it easier to appreciate the mottled blue dye job than at bottom left, where the diamonds push the blue mottling into the background as a textural effect. Neither effect is wrong – just different. Knowing how your design decisions play out in the finished cloth makes you a more effective designer.

I’ve been having a lot of fun looking at and analyzing my samples. Not just pretty cloth – informative experiments! Art science at its best. 🙂

More details and registration for my ANWG seminar on the conference website:
http://www.anwgconference2019.com/

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Robes of fire

The bathrobe is done, and it is GORGEOUS!! It will keep me toasty warm, mentally and physically, all year round:

bathrobe in fiery colors
robes of fire!

I’m particularly happy with how the pattern of the reds and oranges came out. Because I sponged on the red at the very top of the scrunched-up bathrobe, the red patches are centered in the most intense patches of orange, like this:

closeup of flame-dyed bathrobe, showing the intense patches of red centered in the patches of orange

This gives a really nice effect of real fire.

Compare this to the tie-dye towel from my initial experiment:

image of tie-dye towel with randomly painted lines

I tried the paint the lines to fall in the more intense areas of orange, but as you can see, it’s really not the same, and the bathrobe looks way better. Hurray!

The bathrobe inspired me, so last weekend, I hosted a small tie-dye party for some friends. I spent most of the time helping them with their tie-dyes, but took a few moments to make two scrunch-dyed T-shirts for myself – one in fiery colors, like the bathrobe, and another in yellow, orange, and black.

Needless to say, as soon as I laid down the first shirt to take photos, this happened:

photo of fiery-colored T-shirt with a photobombing cat (Tigress)
a photobombing cat!

I love the T-shirt! You’ll notice how it has much more detailed crinkling than the bathrobe. That’s because it’s a lighter-weight fabric than the bathrobe, so it holds tight wrinkles better – and thus produces a more detailed dye job. Not better or worse, just different.

The second shirt reminded me of Sharon’s comment on the previous blog post – “I think Tigress was born tie-dyed.”

I laid the shirt on the bed and snapped a photo of it next to Tigress. There is definitely a family resemblance between the tie-dyed shirt and Her Royal Highness – though, of course, there is no question about who is more fabulously beautiful!

Tigress with a black, orange, and yellow scrunch-dyed tie-dye shirt

Of course, if you take a photo of one cat, the other cat must photobomb. It is The Feline Way:

Fritz sitting on the T-shirt I was trying to take a photo of

Fortunately (for the human), His Royal Highness was just a moment too late – I had already taken the photo I needed. But I snapped a photo of him anyway, because how could you not take a photo of such utter cuteness?

And then, of course, he got a belly rub, because I have only One Job.