Painted Warp

I bought this painted warp from Margaret at Heritage Yarns. The colorway is called Tallahatchee Bridge in 80%/20% rayon silk. I've mixed in stripes of unmercerized cotton in beige and sage green. Under tension, the rayon is a thinner yarn than the cotton but hopefully it will fill back out after wet finishing. I've used another of these painted warps for a shawl and the yarn did do that afterwards. For the warp, I used two turns of the skein starting with the pink. I wish now the ends were either the grey or the olive green as I really like the pink and it's going to end up being thrums. This yardage is going to be part of a jacket for me.

But before I can get started, I have to sample the weft colors. The first (closest to the bottom but not the white - that's toilet paper to spread the warp) is the sage green cotton I used in the warp stripes. It's plain weave. The next is the beige cotton from the stripes in a 3/1 twill. It's okay but I think the colors in the painted warp get lost. Next is the sage green cotton again but in the same twill. I do like that. The last one is a thin white bamboo. I don't recall the size but it's 4000 ypp (yes, quite thin). And again, I think the painted warp gets lost. I could dye the bamboo but that takes time and I really would like to get this going. Besides, the bamboo would make a thinner fabric than the cotton so I'm sticking with the sage green cotton.

You may have noticed the weft isn't perfectly straight from left to right. That's because the tension in the painted rayon/silk is ever-so-slightly different from the tension in the cotton. The rayon/silk stretches more than the cotton. When I beamed it, I tensioned the rayon/silk on it's own weight in hopes it would stretch to its own maximum. This warp may have been a candidate for double-beaming but I don't have a second beam on this loom. Frankly, even if I did, I doubt that I would have been able to get the two tensions any closer than this - they really do feel very much the same. I'm crossing fingers that the wonkiness will disappear in the wet finishing. And since the weft won't be striped, the waves should disappear into the cloth.