Weaving with Easy Dye Cotton

 A friend and I bought some of the new Easy Dye cotton yarn from the Woolery.  I bought several pounds of the 10/2 cotton and now wish I had purchased at least one pound of the 20/2 as well.  There are instructions online on how to paint or dye the cotton, but actually there isn't much to learn.  The cotton is treated with some magic that allows it to accept dye - any dye, without the chemical assistants we usually have to use. 

My first warp  was a 15 yards of black 8/2 rayon, sett at 30 epi.  Too close a sett, but live and learn for next time.  I wove 5 scarves, each with a different treadling sequence.  In order to paint the design, I mixed up a selection of fiber reactive dyes - no soda ash added, just the dye.  I also mixed up a bit of sodium alginate for a thickner, so the dye would stay put when I painted the scarf.  Then I washed the scarf in warm water, rung it out as much as possible and started painting.  After the surface looked good, I flipped it and painted the other side.  Some of the dye had bled through, but not enough to look good.  Therefore, the front and back of the scarf are not exactly the same.

This is the second painting attempt.  I put the scarf in yellow dye and let it sit in the sun for a while.  The black rayon bled a bit and the E-Z Dye cotton sopped up that dye, making the whole scarf a bit greenish.  Then I painted it with reds and greens.

This is what the unpainted blank scarf looks like.  Someone bought one of these because she wanted the black and white look (well, actually shades of gray because of the weave structure).

 

I understand that you can use acid dyes (without the acid), union dyes (but then why would you bother) and natural dye extracts.  I tested a bit of old cochineal dye on the cotton and it took without any mordanting.    One last piece of information about these dyes.  Once the scarf is dyed, there is no dye bleed.  I put mine out in the sun for 30 minutes, but I suspect I wouldn't have had to do that either.  Which leads me to another thought.  I wouldn't want to use this cotton for napkins or towels.  They would pick up every stain, although this might make for some abstract design work.  Who knows?

 

As an addendum to this post, a friend found this link to an article that explains the process used to treat the yarns.  It's a bit technical, but wade through it if you are interested in using Easy Dye cotton.

Handspun Alpaca & Silk Shawl

One handspun alpaca and silk shawl woven!  What a long, long journey if you look at the dates on the handspun yarns I dug out to weave this piece.  Some of them went back to 1999 when I decided I had to spin up everything I had before I bought more fiber.  Notice that I didn't decide I had to use the handspun yarn before I filled my fiber coffers again.

I had a reason to weave the shawl.  There will be an alpaca event later on in October and they want alpaca fiber arts on display.  I knew I had black handspun - some worsted weight, some fine.  I also had a lot of black alpaca that had been blended with white silk - in singles for weaving, but for this project I decided I needed to ply it.  I turned it into a three ply which matched the weight of the worsted yarns.  Thinking thick and thin, I dug out some alpaca that had been plyed with colored silk, some two ply silks in mauve and two balls of finely spun black alpaca. 

In order to make the stripes symmetrical and since it is always tricky when you aren't actually sure how much yarn is on each of the balls, I started winding one inch bouts on the AVL sectional beam, starting in the middle.  Five inches in the center of the warp with mostly black and some of the alpaca silk, which is silver colored.  Then, I wound an inch on each side - two thick threads, two thin ones.  When a ball looked like it was going to run out, I could switch to another ball of something to make sure the stripes matched on each side.  As I approached 25", I could tell that my supplies were pretty well depleted and I stopped at that width.

I chose a 16 shaft crepe draft and for all that it shows, I could have easily used an 8 shaft crepe. The sett is 12 epi.  I had some 8/2 black silk for the weft and beat it very carefully, easing down to just about 5 picks per inch.  I was nervous that the cloth was going to be too sleazy, but at that point there was no going back. 

Once off the loom it did look sleazy.  I lightly knotted the ends of the fringe to keep them from getting too tangled, put it in my front load washer with just a tiny bit of dawn detergent and in the rinse cycle some white vinegar.  The setting on the washer is wonderful - silk and wool and it really is gentle.  When it came out of the washer, things were already starting to look OK.  I put it on a wooden dryer to air dry, twisted fringe and, voila, a shawl that is light, butter soft and very warm.  Sometimes you win in spite of your insecurity.