Tuesday, March 20, 2012

More New "Black" Yarn

Woohoo! UPS dropped off another three boxes of yarn today. This was a fairly large order of mercerized cotton in black and dark jewel tones.

For those of you who aren't fiber nerds, mercerized cotton is shiny and smooth. It has a sparkly luster that looks sort of like silk.

You'll notice that there are a lot of colors here other than black. This batch of cloth will be based on the night sky. The colored threads will be jewel-colored shooting stars. They will be plied with the various shades of black so that they disappear and reappear as they wrap around the thick main threads, truly giving the appearance of points of light in motion across the cloth.

I'm still waiting on another 80 pounds of thin black thread which will be the first yarn to ship to my new studio. Until then, here is my black binge so far, weighing in at about 145 pounds...

And, as a bonus, the new thread comes on cones that are the right size for my Silver Needles cone winder. This means that I can cancel the order that I was about to place for new empty cones. These will all be empty soon enough!

4 comments:

Sandra Rude said...

Love those new colors! I'll look forward to seeing the cloth on the loom.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Sandra!

Of course, they do remind me of the shiny, skinny, highly saturated threads that you use in your photographic jacquard weaving. You dye your threads yourself, though, don't you?

I can't wait to see it on and off the loom myself, but I'm afraid that May first is probably a good guess for completing the black sample blanket. Blue is first, and even with two looms, there's just so fast this can all happen. :)

Blossom

Sandra Rude said...

Yup. The weft thread is mostly hand-dyed. Since the success of each image depends on the right weft color, I can't depend on a mill to provide the hues I want - I have to make 'em myself.

Unknown said...

I sometimes wish that I could dye my own threads. I have the skill and experience for it, but the quantities that I'm using (and my low profit margin) keep me from doing it for the type of weaving that I'm doing at the moment.

Sandra, I just saw the latest batch of dyeing on your blog. Your new colors look great!