Madder makes a nice red, but more often than red I see it produce an orange, which I'm not a super fan of for myself.

That's to say, the dye weekend went well. We got the grey tabby to a madder orange, as well as the white cloth. However, since I am not a fan of that orange I asked if we could get a proper red for the white raw weave, so the second day we overdyed that piece with madder and cochenil to get a beautiful strong red cloth. Exactly what I had envisioned.

Some factors that could have affected the colour: we only soaked the madder root for a couple of hours, not over night. The cloth may have had some aperture left from the spinning as I did not wash it after weaving. The temperature could have been a little low.

In any case, the overdyeing worked a treat.

After we got home I machine washed the two cuts in 40 degrees. The white cloth was mostly plain weave, but there were 2.6 m of twill, which after the washing felted quite dramatically. The plain weave turned out great. It tightened up nicely and will turn into my new red kirtle.

The grey, now orange, is a beautifully soft cloth, and the variegation in the colour is still evident through the orange hue. I might designate that for my husband- or figure out a new project for this.



All the images on flickr: Dye stuff

I've started the second dye stuff project on the loom.

I had a sheep grey wool which has already been woven up into mostly 2/2 twill (9 meters), and some tabby (5 meters). Now I've warped up 12 meters of sheep white to weave into mostly tabby (I'm thinking 8 meters) and the rest 2/2 twill.

Using my warping mill for the second time I am learning that I need to pick a lane - when winding on I start at the top, go around the mill in a downward spiral, turn around the peg where I create a cross to keep track of my ends, to go back up again.

So far I have wound the warp with the downward spiral laid above the guide string, and the upward spiral beneath the guide string. This means that when I chain the warp up after measuring all ends out I will always have maximum distance between two ends that on the loom should be running side-by-side.

I suppose there might be some way to cleverly fold the warp in half when taking it off the mill to fold them into a more proper alignment again, but I would need someone to teach me such arcane movements. 

In the alternative I could just pick one side of the guide string and follow that every time. So aiming for above the guide string on the way down, and also on the way up. 

In a third option I might make smaller sections of warp chain, which would make this problem much smaller. This would also mean that I would have to weight many smaller sections individually when beaming the warp.

This warp is only 664 ends - speaking of, dammit why didn't I just go once more around for a fun number - which I warped up in two chains of 332 ends each. 16 bouts of 20 ends and one bout of 12. This works out to spread out evenly over 4 harnesses. If I had added two ends I would have two shafts with one more heddle than the other two.

I chose to thread my heddles to minimise friction on adjoining ends for the plain weave. So I threaded 1 - 3 - 2 - 4, lifting shafts 1 and 2 for the first shed, and shafts 3 and 4 for the second shed of a tabby. This puts a little more distance between the fixed points, which gives less friction.

I could have used all six harnesses for even more spread, but, this yarn is still fairly stable and it would make threading heddles more difficult and annoying, because counting to 4 is easier than counting to 6, and the working distance for threading 6 shafts becomes a little longer, thus more annoying, than over 4 shafts.

I beam it with the help of weights on the back of the chains and roll on with paper between the layers. I threaded the heddles and sleyed the reed over midsummer and on Sunday the 22:nd I could start filling bobbins and throwing shuttles. 

The warp used up just over 7 skeins of yarn, and the remaining yarn from the 8th skein got me to 69 cm woven on the loom. By that time it was late enough in the day that I stopped there.

I didn't realize I had stopped at exactly 69 cm until I took a picture of the measuring tape on my loom.

Nice.

I tried to be funny on fb and posted that fact, but my friends are all too classy, or think I am too classy to make that reference.

Anyway, I'm trucking along, and hopefully will be finished with this warp well in time for the dyeing weekend at my apprentice, Cristina's place this summer.

It will be fun to compare how the white cloth takes the dye as opposed to the grey cloth. I have high hopes to make a good deep madder red to make myself a new 16th century kirtle or petticoat.