Weekly 5

Ollie Kimlicko

My main goal this week was to use the thermochromic yarn in a way that made it striking when heated up. I tried both painting the warp and painting the weft so I could try techniques with hiding and showing the colored yarn. I wanted to use blue yarn to blend in with the weft and withteh colroed yarn so it seemed more striking when the yarn changed color.

Painting the Warp

The stickiness of the pigment made some of the warp ends stick together, so much that pulling them apart made the tension in the ends change. This quality also gave the warp a strange texture that had a lot more friction than regular yarn. When I beat the weft, it took a lot of force to actually push the weft picks together. The color really wasn't that different since the warp ends were already pretty dark. Doing basic tabby didn't show the warp much, so I tried to leave space between rows. The texture of the yarn helped keep the yarn in place when I added rows above. I then triued a basket weave, since this would leave large areas of hidden warp mixed with areas of hidden weft. Neither of these worked very well since the warp was already so dark blue.

Painting the Weft

I painted the weft yarn with both blue and pink, in a kind of tie-dye look. I just wanted as much coverage over a lot of yarn as I could get, so I had lots to experiment with. Again, the pigment was sticky, so my ball of yarn stuck together as I painted it. First, I used supplemental weft techniques to try to float the colored yarn over the main weft. I kept forgetting what I was trying to do, since I didn't plan ahead, so it ended up a bit messy. Next, I did basic tabby with both yarns to see how much the colored yarn would show through. Wanting to hide the yarn as much as possible to make it striking when it turned white, I switched to using a thicker, darker yarn. I did tabby with both, then twisted the two together (I taped the ends to a drill to twist them) then used them both together.

I think I could have done a lot more with this yarn. Structurally, I am not confident enough to do anything much more complicated than tabby. Using supplemental weft techniques does help, because I know I can eep my weaving structurally sound and it also adds some speed to the process, but I am still unsure if I am doing the techniques correctly (I think my inlay turned into overshot without me realizinf it). I wish I had been able to use a white warp yarn, because I think having blue paint over it, and using a blue weft yarn would have given better options with the qualities of the thermochromic pigment. When heated, the white warp yarn woul dshow through, suddenly revealing an otherwise hidden pattern, and when cold, the weaving would just be the one blue color. So this is something I would like to try at some point.

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