Sawdust Again

Yesterday I began to dye skeins for the next Wood Series scarves, starting with the warp. One half the warp is dyed with redwood chips I scooped off the woodshop floor after DH turned a batch of redwood burl bowls on the lathe. Here's what the thread looked like while still in the dyebath:



Nice redwood-ish sort of color, right? Sorry, the granite backsplash behind the pot doesn't make an ideal backdrop for photos... oh, well.

The other half of the warp is dyed with chips from some unidentified tropical hardwood. More materials scooped off the woodshop floor. DH has a tool that lets him cut a series of bowls (sucessively smaller) from the same block of wood, so he's already saving as much of the block of wood as possible (without this tool, the entire inside of the largest bowl becomes shavings; with the tool, only the inside of the smallest bowl becomes shavings). I'm using up what little there is of the shavings that remain for dye. The ultimate in recycling!



The skeins spent most of yesterday afternoon at a temperature under 140 F, and then sat in their dyebaths overnight before being rinsed this morning. Both yarns will be quite a bit lighter after they are dried. Tencel seems to dry more shades lighter when dyed with natural dyes than it does when dyed with Procion MX.

Now I need to wind off skeins for the wefts, mordant them, and dye them. I've got walnut chips and brasilwood chips and red iron bark eucalyptus shavings soaking in jars in the garage, but I'll need to start a few more to have enough different weft colors.

This will be another interleaved threading, based on two different network drafted twills, one threaded in the redwood-dyed yarn, the other in the hardwood-dyed yarn, alternating end-by-end.

I already know how many ends it needs to be to come out to 11 inches in the reed, sleyed at 65 epi, so I start with two design lines that are each a given number of ends more than half the total number of ends required, then trim from left and/or right until the design area plus selvedge ends adds up to 715 total.

Once I've finalized the threading, I'll post a screenshot of the draft.