Fear of Warping

I never completed my final project for my weaving class because I was pretty much on my own. My teacher was out of town for a good six weeks and I felt so intimidated by warping the loom without a hand to hold.
I do have a backstrap loom around here and a rigid heddle of a sorts (old and a different from the ones I see in weaving catalogs).
But I found the solution or so I think at this point.

This is a Brio loom. Brio as in Thomas the Tank Engine train set and all those other wonderful toys for preschoolers!
The fact that it is for a child makes the warping less intimidating. Although I imagine the warping is probably supposed to be done by an adult while the child gets to do the fun part-the actual weaving. Still I think it might help me get over my fear of warping.
I picked the little loom up at a thrift store. It just seemed to be the perfect opportunity to wrestle with this uneasiness.
While I was there, I picked up 21 copies of an old magazine "Handweaver & Craftsman", all from the sixties and early seventies.






I looked through the magazines quickly and am now going through one by one and reading the articles. But one of the first things that caught my eye was this wonderful wheel called the Penguin Quill.



Isn't it cool? I want one. I don't care how it spins.


In the first magazine I went through pretty thoroughly, I found an article on Lichen Dyeing. This is wonderful since I missed Judith MacKenzie McCuin's class at Black Sheep Gathering on that very subject this past weekend.
For such a short article, I gleaned more information on the practical approaches to lichen dyeing than from a book devoted entirely to the subject.
All of the lichens that produce the scarlets and purples need ammonia to extract the dye. Soaking for a few days or even a few weeks in a solution of ammonia & water (I'll check on the exact ratio) will yield the colors. But a quick way to check if a lichen will produce these colors is to put a drop of Chlorox on the powdered lichen. If the drop turns scarlet, then you have your hands on some wonderful dyestuff.




I spun up the kid mohair roving that I dyed in turquoise & brown leaving lots of white spots. I love the yarn!

It's about 220 yards of a 2 ply that is half way between fingering weight and laceweight. I thought that it wasn't enough to do much with. Perhaps I'd get a wimpy little airy scarf. Then I realized that I never consider combining my handspun with commercial yarn. I began to get playful, pulling out balls of yarn and finally found some Crystal Palace Kid Merino that I thought would be fun.





It's just a scarf. It really is fun to knit because the blueish yarn changes so much that I keep knitting just to see what's next.
I was imagining if I had more yarn what I would do with it. The scarf feels like a swatch. Of course I have enough for a cap.




But I was fantasizing about having enough do make something like this:





Well I liked the turquoise, brown & white colorway so much I dyed about 4 ounces of silk caps with the same dyes.
Silk caps are the degummed cocoons laid out over a mold that is shaped like a bell or a cap. There are many thin, thin layers.


They have more white than I planned on. I soaked the silk for a couple of days to wet it properly but either I have to break up the caps into thinner layers or I have to weight the caps down with something. The dyes will only penetrate thoroughly wetted fiber.
It should be fun to see what it ends up looking like spun up.