Week Two Blog Post

Week two has been quite a slow week in terms of progress as it always is at the start of a weave project.

I was faced with the first challenge of the week: dip dyeing my warp. I decided to dip dye rather than paint the warp as it is less time consuming. I do not have a natural flair when dyeing as I find it difficult to get the colours to come out how I imagine them to. This made me nervous when I took my warp down to the dye lab. Despite my initial cautiousness the colours actually turned out better than any of my test hanks, so I was pleased with the final result.

As well as dyeing my warp for the first time, I am using another new method, piqué. It means that the threading up of my loom will be slightly different to what I am used to. Whilst threading my base cloth across two blocks of six shafts, I will be taking one thread from the pique warp between every two threads from the base cloth. This means that my threading plan will progress like this: 1, 2, 13, 3, 4, 14, 5, 6, 15 etc.

Although at first I found this method of threading to be quite difficult and confusing, resulting in having to restart some sections multiple times, I eventually got the hang of it.

I am slightly disappointed that it has taken me so long to get on the loom having being set back by the dye lab. Despite this I do feel like two weeks is a good amount of time to make some progress.

My aim for the oncoming week is to get through half of my warp with some great samples as I only have two more weeks left on the loom.



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Week One

Week one has helped give my work a push in the right direction to develop on from the summer project into a grounded weave project. On day one I was feeling particularly lost, and as though my work had come to and “end”.

After looking through my sketchbook for inspiration for my warp I was particularly interested in one group of drawings (vertical lines, soft edges, patches of colour, space between colour)

From these drawings I have decided on making a warp that contained isolated sections to be either dip-dyed or painted with dye. I will also be making another smaller warp to add on a separate beam to create a pique weave, inspired by the wavy lines in my drawings. I have made a choice to use undyed mercerised cotton as I have preferred to use this yarn in previous work due to the strength of the yarn. I thought that mercerised cotton should be relatively straight forward to dye.

As I am new to dyeing, having only had a health and safety induction to the dye lab last year, I decided to first test out the different coloured dyes on some smaller hanks of the mercerised cotton. This turned out to be an excellent idea as I soon discovered that I was not very talented at mixing up the correct colours. My first hank turned out to be a completely wrong; brown came out purple and black turned blue. Once this hank was transferred onto a cone, however, I actually thought that it looked a lot better, despite not being true to my colour palette.

On Friday I left three more hank tests drying in the dye lab to be picked up on Monday.

From my experimentation in the dye lab I have learnt that it isn’t as straight forward as I first thought, I definitely need more practice and will need to test the dye on a smaller hank before sacrificing my warp to be dyed incorrectly!

***** Need to scan drawings from sketchbook and add photo of first dyed hank on cone *****


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