2nd Attempt

Well, my journey with warp painting continues with round two.  Here is the list of what went wrong this time.

1.  Warp was too wet.  I got more bleeding in the knot area than I would have liked.  Ugh…. (Note to self:  in future blot the warp before painting!)

2.  Mysterious faint smudges of pale blue that are no where near where I was painting.  These blue smudges are behind the stencil and it was a brand new stencil that I cut since I was afraid any leftover dye on the first stencil might cause problems (unlikely, I now know, since the dye on that has lost its activation)….still, I was also afraid that the manilla folder’s cut edges might have gotten a little soggy from the first round of dyeing so I just thought it best to go with a new stencil.  So, how on earth did these smudges get on the warp?  There is no dye at all on the back of the stencil, and the smudges occured in an area that was covered by the plain, uncut part of the stencil.  No clue….

See all those smudges above the beginning of the knot?  Most of them will be in the hem, but not all.  I am pretty bummed about this right now…. the blue warp that is in the lower left corner of the photo is my shadow…..not a blue warp!

I’ve been thinking about the kind of shifting I’m getting as I wind back on, and although the shifting has been quite different for each project, there is one thing that the two projects I did at home have in common that is different from the two projects done in class with Sarah Saulson.

Sarah insisted that we tug on our warps after every revolution of the warp beam.  I hated doing that.  I felt like I was losing the registration of what I’d painted when I grabbed the whole width of the warp in one hand and tugged.  But I have to admit that the two scarves done with that technique have almost no shifting.  I guess I will give that a try this time.  Besides, I feel like this round is already a failure, so not much to lose.