11 December 2013

Hand painted warp


This is a project spanning so many months I cannot even remember when I started it.

Ages ago I purchased in the Texere website a "very fine cotton" not realising that "very fine" equals to "insanely fine" in my classification.

The thread is soooo thin that I don't have enough heddles to use it by itself. I spent hours winding it into a warp and then I painted it using Procion MX dyes. The weft was died with the same type of dye in a solid turquoise.

I then left it in a bag waiting to be brave enough to warp all the heddles I own.

I am working it as a simple tabby. I should say that I choose this structure to show off the painted warp but actually I know that it is going to be hard enough without adding anything else.

I found that for some unknown reason one side of the warp is tighter than the other. On top of that, in the middle of the weaving, I had to move house and the castle of my table loom had to be folded. This requires all the tension to be removed from the warp. That -I am afraid- did not help any with the bad tensioning.