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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