(This blog post was originally published September 8, 2010 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.)

I was so jazzed by the idea of woven shibori (see previous post), that I started thinking about all the commercially dyed chenille in my stash that I could re-purpose using this technique. I have a bunch (under 10 lbs.) of commercially dyed rayon chenille, in colors that are okay, but not wonderful and in a weight that is a bit heavier than I use for my dye painting. And I thought, wouldn’t it be a hoot great idea to use up these not-so-great colors of yarn by overdyeing with some better colors, and have some fun with shibori at the same time?

So I chose some tepid red and some off-pumpkin and warped those two colors in stripes. When I got them to the loom, they kind of reminded me of really bad school colors.

Which led me to thinking that I could overdye the scarf once, when it came off the loom, then pull up and tie the shibori pattern threads, and then dye the scarf again, thus adding a third color in the semi-controlled shibori patterning.

I chose Dharma Brilliant Blue for the overdye, but decided to try it out on sample skeins to see what colors I would get. Here you see the before and after:

I went to the Cushings website for some guidance on what to expect when overdyeing. (The Cushings overdyes are for acid dyes on wool, but I figured the colors would be in the ballpark for fiber reactive dyes on rayon.) The off-pumpkin turned into a nice gray which was predicted by Cushings, but the tepid red turned into burgundy, which I didn’t expect. Cushings predicted blue over red would yield purple. I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s all part of the adventure.

Stay tuned.