After having woven enough of a placemat to check the loom dressing, I'm now moving on to preparing the coloured stripes. This time I am trying to speed up the process a little, hopefully making it less tedious. I've measured a weft shot from the test weaving to ensure I have pretty close to the actual length rather than just the width of the warp/drawn in weaving. On the loom the drawn in width is 12 5/8 inches with the actual weft shot measuring 13 1/8. I have cut some plastic dividers (the kind used in folders) to exactly half the 13 1/8 measurement and then glued them together to make a fairly rigid (but thin) waterproof frame to wind the linen yarn around.
The idea is to be able to make a whole lot more painted/dyed yarn than the groups of single stripes I made for the last placemats. It will randomise the pattern a lot more over the whole series of placemats, but that should be fine with the colours and design I have planned.
This morning I mixed up the soda ash mix and the chemical water/thickener. The former so that I can get the first lot of linen soaking while the latter is setting/thickening before I mix up the colours from the Fiber Reactive dyes I have.
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| Linen, wound on card, soaking in soda-ash solution |
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| Ready to start mixing colours |
The chemical water should be ready by tomorrow morning, so I should be able to paint on the dyes and then let that set for 24 hours - wash the yarn out and dry it ready to start weaving some test stripes by Monday.
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