(This blog post was originally published March 12, 2016 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.)

Just realized it’s been almost two months since the last post. Much is happening Chez iowaweaver and much more is going to be happening very soon. We are still getting the house ready to sell, and it is a hard slog, but we are getting there. I had surgery a week ago Monday (planned, not an emergency, but definitely putting a crimp in my style). But, I have scarves to show off!

I am done weaving until after the move. All the yarn, except for some skeins of sock yarn for knitting, is in storage. My last warp was for a batch of Woven Shibori Scarves (see my previous post). I ended up with five scarves, quite a lot for me, as I am not really a production weaver.

I used a threading from the book Woven Shibori by Catherine Ellis. It’s an advancing twill on 8 harnesses, and for each scarf I did something different in the treadling to minimize the boredom factor (see my previous post). So, when dyed, each one has a slightly different look.

Technical details: I used 2000 yards per pound rayon chenille sett at 20 epi. The pattern threads (see my previous post) were 6 ply DMC embroidery floss that I bought on the cone at Walmo online. FYI, embroidery floss works really well here. It’s strong, cause you need that for gathering the scarves and tieing them for dyeing.

I used an indigo dye kit by Jacquard for three of the scarves. If you haven’t tried this dye method yet, I highly recommend it. It’s super easy if you follow the directions. The kit makes a ton of dye, and you can pretty much go crazy with it until it’s finally used up. Fair warning: it smells…. earthy…  And you’ll need a five gallon bucket with a lid to keep it in.

Indigo is considered a vat dye, where the goods to be dyed are submerged in the dye pot. So, after drawing up the pattern threads very tightly and tieing them on each scarf, you dip them in the dye bucket and kind of swirl them around for about a minute or two. It doesn’t take long! The scarf on the left had been dye-painted with a light blue fiber reactive dye for a base. The other two were left completely white.

The other two scarves were dye-painted in other colors with fiber reactive dyes. One was dusty rose, the other coral pink. When it came to the shibori dyeing faze, I again painted the dye on, On dusty rose I used black dye, which rinsed and dried to a dark dark burgundy. On coral pink I used purple.

After rinsing and drying well, the scarves kind of sat around for a long time until I felt well enough to start cutting the embroidery floss threads and revealing the underlying patterns. I then machine washed the scarves to get the pleats out and get a real look at all of them.

Next step will be to wash them (again) and dry them in a dryer so I can finally pull out the headers and twist the fringes.

Slow? Yeah.