Painted Warps

I spent a windy Thursday with my friend, Vicki, and I cannot say how thankful I am she has a large, well lit garage space. After my Press n' Seal blew off the table and unrolled about a third of it over the yard, and we were just doing prep work, we moved it inside the garage.

We each dyed six warps. It took ALL afternoon. I was exhausted when I got home. Friday was blustery, cold, spitting rain, an all around ugly day, and the warps needed to set for 24 hours anyhow, (I know you don't have to technically let them set, but I like to - I think it deepens the colors). So I washed warps this morning.

I haven't painted warps in a couple years. I used to do quite a bit of it, but times and life change. It's quite a process, not something you can do on a whim when you have a couple hours. First, I wind the warps (these are 8/2 Tencel), then wash and dry them, paint them on dye day, then wash the excess dyes out, dry them again (line drying, of course) and some day this winter, when it's cold and miserable out, I'll be weaving gorgeous scarves and stoles.

So, here's some close-ups of the individual warps. This is the first time I've had black to play with, thanks to my son-in-law, Brian, letting me use his left over dyes from tie-dyeing. It's amazing what a little black does to different colors. I had no idea it's the secret ingredient to a lot of color variation.





These are blues and purples, and a pretty heavy color saturation of both.





Grays and a rose.





Mauve, purple, blue, all of it slightly grayed.





Grays, blues, a very light dusty rose.





This one's a real mix, yellow to green, so you have all shades of yellow in there, plus some reddish, some blue, some purply red. I think this is going to be pretty.





Blues and greens.

They're drying now. Yes, my fingers are sore from washing out. Yes, I will probably do this again. No, I did not get my two 12-yard cotton warps dyed Thursday. What was I thinking? But, tomorrow's another day. I'd like to get these done before winter, and when I come back in November, it may well be winter.



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