Experiment with Chenille

Recently I dyed some beige rayon chenille with magenta, reds and blues.  The dyeing process is something I learned in a Kathrin Weber class about a year ago and she calls it "cupcake" dyeing.  Simply put, I dyed the yarn while it was still in center pull balls, thus giving me a variegated yarn.

 

Chenille is lovely stuff, but can be troublesome once woven.  It tends to "worm" in weave structures that have longer floats and many weavers just end up using plain weave rather than risk the piece turning into a bumpy mess after wet finishing.  I decided to experiment with my variegated chenille, using a weave structure with the chenille mostly showing on one side and the other side predominantly showing the 8/2 blue rayon warp, sett at 20 epi.

 

There is lots of color variation in the scarf as you can see from the photos below.  The middle fabric photo is a close up of the chenille side and also the warp face side so that you can see the color differences. Notice also the neat little pattern on the blue side of the scarf.

 

I wet finished the piece and put it in the dryer to make sure that worming wasn't going to be a problem.  It wasn't and I'm satisfied that the fabric will be stable and I can use this technique for future projects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should you want to weave your own scarves, the draft is shown below.  The chenille weft is the thicker thread and a finer thread that weaves on shafts 2 and 4 is in orange.  (I used a maroon fine weft to go with the chenille colors, but used orange in the draft so that you could see the structure more clearly).

I also used six treadles to keep my place in the pattern more easily.  Thick, thin, thick, thick, thin, thick.

 



 

 

This last draft is just the reverse side of the draft above.  See how the blue warp is the predominant color on this side.

 



Rayon Chenille "Skinny" Scarves

Variegated rayon chenille scarves -- two of em! I never do plain weave -- well almost never. But I decided that I had so much stash of chenille that I really had to do something with it. So, I consulted with Su Butler on Weavolution's Rayon Chenille Forum and she suggested 18epi. The warp was 6 yards in length and I had just about 1 foot of waste for the two scarves. Not bad. They are narrow and long. My biggest problem was the twisted fringe. I ordered Su's CD which is due out sometime this month (Understanding Rayon Chenille) and there are supposed to be detailed instructions on doing the fringe and an alternative which doesn't leave any little naked beards at the ends of the knots. For these scarves I decorated the fringe with beads which probably took more time than weaving them. Every time I had to rethread the beading needle, it took forever to find that 

tiny little hole. So, the goal is to make quality chenille scarves with twisted fringe finishes that will hold up to washing and drying. I certainly have enough chenille to do a full scale study on the subject.