Dying, Drying, Coning and Warping.... Yarn!

This week has been such a busy week, however I am not into rugby so I thought I would take this opportunity to catch up with my blogging! My project has really got going this week which is good as I like to feel productive! I have created an initial colour palette and experimented with dying my yarns for the first time! I am using silk to work with for this project as it captures and reflects light really well so understatedly enhances my concept. Not only this, it also a perfect yarn that can be used in both fashion and interiors which it makes ideal for my intended outcome of a dual-pupose fabric for both design areas.

This week I have been keeping a photographic record which I thought I would put up on my blog!





Mixing Dyes: The kitchen became a lab for a few nights this week with mixing bowls everywhere! Just using dylon cold water dyes you can get really well matched colours by mixing the poweders together and doing lots of little tests with small yarn windings, testing times and dye intensity!

Before dying the yarns you have to make hanks, which is when you spin the yarn off the cone onto a hank-winder -- I should probably photograph the hank-winder as it would make so much more sense!





Initial Colour Palette: The silk dyed really well and produced some really intense hues of colour to match my colour palette ideas for this blanket warp. 5 colours taken from my sketchbook work based on the previous photographs of light that I have posted on here. I am really pleased with the yarns! (They are shown at the beginning of this post too on the cones).

Note: tying lease knots (like half inch bundle knots) in the hanks of yarn worked so well as the yarns didn't tangle at all!





Hank Onto Cone: To be able to make a warp and weave with the now dyed yarn I needed to get it back onto a cone. As the photos show, you use this machine to get it back onto the cone. Amazingly the yarn did not snap very much at all! I kept it going at a very slow speed to try and prevent any snapping and the whole process took about 3 hours as I had 8 bundles of yarn to get back onto cones!






Warps: Finally these last 2 photos show my warps on the warping mill. I have made 2 warps that will sit alongside each other to produce an overall blanket warp, so that I can experiement with different structures and effects!

I am really excited to weave with my yarns as I have found it particularly enjoyable learning the craft processes of dying and preparing yarns that go into producing highly personal fabrics all from scratch. I am beginning to feel more strongly about how important it is to encourage crafts, particularly weaving back into Britain!!! Which, reminds me, I really want to make sure I watch the new series on T.V by Monty Don about reviving crafts in Britain!