Guild Weekend

Thirty-odd members of Kennet Valley Guild met up at a local hotel for two intensive days of textiles. The weaving group had decided not to have a tutor but to take part in a Black Jack game. There was a lot of consultation and laughter and some extremely funny jokes which are not suitable for a family audience as the Guardian puts it. My three Black Jack cards read

1) Dark rich colours

2) Tweed like weave

3) use knitting

 

My use of knitting was to dye blanks of machine knitted stuff (thank you Marion Proctor). The dyed effect was not what I wanted. I wanted a slow gradation between red and purple through grey but I produced a sharp change from red to grey and a very patchy result from grey to purple.

 

This is the red end. I can persuade myself that it gets paler towards the top. The warp is the Aland Island space dyed yarn and the stripes areteh effect of the space dyeing

 

And this is the blue end which does shade from grey to purple.

 

 

And here is the intermediate bit shading from purple at the bottom to red at the top. Not good.

 

Actually not much of it was any good. It was a mistake to use the warp I did. It is really knitting yarn and kept separating at the edges. So I replace the four outer threads on each side with worsted yarn and that stopped the thread breaking problem.  I was going to make a waistcoat but will wait till I have washed it to decide. It is a long time since I wove up a whole project and mended all the ends in two days!