The blanket 2017

At last, I have finished spinning the five pounds of yarn I will need for my next blanket project! This time, it will be plenty long, because I measured the bed and allowed for shrinkage and tucking in.  It will be woven double-width, so the width of the loom limits the width of the blanket to about 82 inches after washing/fulling.  Good thing we have a double bed.

I’ll be using some black yarn from Judy’s Black Welsh Mountain sheep, some gray yarn from our Rufus blended with a purchased merino cross light gray fleece, and some white yarns that will be dyed with acid dyes.  Yesterday, I gathered up my courage and dyed the yarns.  There were 12 skeins to be dyed turquoise (Aussie Landscapes dye called “Ice”) and 7 to be dyed a light tan (Judith Mackenzie’s “worker brown”.  I even tested the dyes on small skeins I’ll use to weave a sample on the table loom.   Things went ok, except that the brown was a bit dark and I was not sure why.  I decided to make the dye bath about 1/4 strength to keep the final dye light.  But the math wasn’t easy, and things did not look right.  I was getting nervous, wondering if I have forgotten how to do basic arithmetic.  Finally I understood the problem:  one set of dyes work on a 10% basis, meaning dye powder is weighed out at 10% of the fiber weight. The other set are weighed at 1%.  So yes, I had missed a decimal point, but it was because the dyes are different.

Here are the results:

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