Yesterday I taught “Painting Roving for Predictable Yarns” at the Ottawa Valley Weaver’s and Spinner’s Resource Centre.  It’s a 1 day workshop in handpainting rovings that will spin into something other than mud or clown vomit.  My goal is to teach how to plan and execute a multicoloured roving that will spin into a beautiful yarn that can then be made into a beautiful finished object.  Yes plan, I know many artists think that’s a nasty word, but I’m not really an artist, I’m an artisan, meaning I have solid technical skills in my craft that allow me to create things that are both beautiful and functional.  Later this week I’ll post about why I think that planning is important, but for now, let me show the fun we had yesterday.

Things always start out neat and tidy…

After I got through all the information about the washfast acid dyes, equipment, etc and talked about the factors that influence how the finished yarns and objects will look the students started planning their rovings.  Each student had 4 60g skeins of roving to dye, it was up to them whether they made all different or some the same.  I had neglected to mention that planning for painting requires arithmetic…  Once we got that over with it was time to have fun with colours:

Measuring out the Dye Solutions

Putting the Dyes on the Fibre

Smooshing to Distribute the Dye

Painted and Ready for Heat

Microwaving to Set the Dye

NB:  this is an elderly “free to a good home” microwave I was lucky enough to find for the guild to use for dyeing.  It’s labelled “not for food”.  We have another one for lunches.

By the time everyone was finished painting and heat setting it was time to go home.  The rovings need to cool before rinsing so most of the students took theirs home to rinse and dry.  Hopefully they will bring them to the Guild meeting tomorrow night so I can take some pictures of the finished product.  We (that would include the intrepid instructor) learned quite a lot about colour mixing.  Not all the colours came out quite as planned.  There may be a little bit of overdyeing on some to get closer to what we were expecting. Many of the colours looked very, very different before and after heating.  We also learned that it is important to pay careful attention when mixing the painting solutions.  One student wondered why her lavender looked so very red.  It turned out we had forgotten to add the blue!!  Amazingly, it was an easy fix to add the right amount of blue to a little bit of water, then spread and smoosh it into the stripe that was supposed to be lavender.

It was a long day, but we all had fun.  I can’t wait to see what yarns result…  Stay tuned for follow up.