Scarf Project - Color Scheme!

I needed to decide on a color scheme.  Bamboo and Tencel as fibers can be dyed with fiber reactive dyes just like cotton.  They are cellulose based fibers, not proteins.  I also have some dyes on hand for tie dying and started there.  I had DEEP ORANGE and was thinking of that for my weft.

I wanted a combination of a rust red, brownish orange, maybe a nice violet splash to round out the colors.  I buy all my dying supplies at DHARMA TRADING They have the largest selections of dyes and chemicals known to man (including stuff to dye as well).

The hard part is looking through their "color chips" and getting a good feel for the colors themselves.  I poked through them and picked SOFT ORANGE, ORANGE CRUSH, PAGODA RED and RED VIOLET.  When they arrived I was unsure of how to "sample them".  A friend (Joe Cole of What the Flock hand dyed yarn and fiber)  Suggested i just use a Q-Tip and smudge the top of the dye container.  I thought that was a great idea but colors can shift when washing out.  So I used a prepared piece of fabric and made smudges of my four colors.  Let them set, washed and dried the scrap.  Below is the pic.

My favorite is the pagoda red.  I also think either the orange crush or the soft orange is going to be my weft color.  Otherwise I am unsold on the oranges.  The pagoda is nice and I will probably use it but am looking for a brownish color.  The oranges are too close and you would probably not notice the difference in a line up.

I ordered two more dyes: GINGER SNAP, and TERRA COTTA.  I will sample that with the deep orange.  Hopefully they will allow me to complete my color scheme.  The hand paint is supposed to be asymetrical.  You will flip every other group to get the color bar type pattern you saw in the first posting!

A quick dye process.

• A solution of soda ash and warm water is mixed.
• Your sample or fiber soaks in the soda ash for 15-20 minutes.  This creates the conditions necessary chemically for the dye to bond.
• A solution of Urea (nitrogen) and water is mixed. 
• A very small amount is used to turn your dye powder into a paste.  Adding a little more water as you go to create a nice loose slurry with no lumps.
• Pasted dye is mixed into the remaining water/urea solution to create your dye stock.
• Fiber or fabric is painted or soaked in the dye.
• The item is allowed to rest 8 to 24 hours for the brightest best colors.
• The fiber or fabric is washed in special detergent to remove all the remaining dye and the item is allowed to dry thoroughly and the color is set!

Scarf Project!

Found a cool hand painted warp scarf project in an older issue of Handwoven magazine.  It features strips of warp you hand dye and then flip them alternately to vary the pattern.  The weft is a single color that blends will with your other colors.  The warp is sett at 30 EPI which is slightly higher than the warp yarn calls for so it packs a bit tighter and gets a bit more emphasis.

The kit from Interweave.com was $60.  I did not like the blue color combo it is offered in and when I went back to look for it the Autumn colored kit had been sold out.  I decided to DIY it.  I have dyed and stuff before, so figured this was definitely doable!

My first challenge was YARN.  There is always yarn, but specific yarns comes and go.  This project is from the May/June 2013 edition of Handwoven Magazine (pgs. 50-52).  The yarns mentioned in the original article are no longer available.  The kits currently on sale offers a different set of yarns.  When I decided to weave this project those yarns were not easily obtainable either so I wound up with a third set of yarns.

In this case the warp is thicker than the weft.  The warp is sett at 30 EPI.  This means in each inche wide of the scarf you would expect to count 30 threads (think about those 700 thread sheets you sleep on).  The weft is sett at 16PPI or picks per inch.  A pick is a single pass of the weft yarn through the warp threads.  You should count 16 per inch.

After all is said and done i think i picked yarns that will get me really close to the original.  The main trait to use for substitution of yarn is YARDS/POUND.  I have summarized the yarns below.  Please note mine came in NATURAL since we will be hand painting them with dyes.

	Warp	Weft	Yds/Lb.
Original	12/2 Silk	30/2 Silk	2950/7440
Kit	5/2 Tencel	10/2 Tencel	2100/4200
Mine	8/2 Tencel	16/2 Bamboo	3360/6720

Tencel and Bamboo are made in the same fashion using by products of processing the hard materials.  Tencel is made from the oils extracted from cotton and is a type of viscose

My hope is I choose yarns close enough to the originals to get the same effects. If anything I might not get the 16ppi but I have prepared 400Yds of warp just in case. Maybe I will use less. I am fairly new to subbing my own yarns. Next time we will talk about my color choices and how that is going. We also look at my hand dyed warp.