Yarns with a Mysterious Past

A group of scarves from the same warp
various weft colors and color orders
8H Shadow Weave, Strickler #271

Sometimes yarns come to me without a clue to their source or history. Several large cones of a yarn marked 8/2 “Rayon Slub” have been on my shelf for rather a long while. There is no knowing how long they sat on the shelf of an unknown weaver before they found their way to me. These are yarns with a mysterious past.

I have woven with this 8/2 “Rayon Slub” before and it made a lovely, soft, lustrous cloth. But this time around I noticed something new.

The draft for these scarves is an 8H Shadow Weave, #271 in Carol Strickler’s book. The warp is two colors, “Ink” and White. It was fun to try using different combinations of colors and color orders for the weft colors. The variations can be dramatically different. 

I wove six scarves each 6” x 70” finished. At each end I wove 36 shots with sewing thread as weft for the hems. Each of them was hemmed on the sewing machine using a triple-stitch zigzag. Then they all went into the washer and the dryer for finishing. It was then that I noticed the problem.

Various weft colors and weft color orders

They all washed beautifully but what I could not escape was a nasty chemical odor. It would seem that chemicals used to produce this yarn lingered long afterward. Here I had spent many hours weaving six lovely scarves unwearable by anyone with a sense of smell. Bother!

Turning to the Internet to search for explanation and/or solution I read various methods to reduce the odor. One suggestion was to launder using Borax and hot water. I tried this on the scarf with purple as a weft color. The purple bled into the white warp but it actually looks pretty that way. Still the stench remained. Nothing I tried worked to remove it.

What could I do? What did I do? I folded those six scarves into a nice neat pile, stuffed them onto an upper shelf and forgot about them.

That was way back in March. We have all been thinking about other things since then. Who knew a virus from China would stop just about everything? Our home office has become a virtual workplace, leaving little time for fun stuff such as blogging. But today, a rare day of availability, while writing to post I went to find these scarves.

The infamous "stinky" purple scarf, washed with hot water and Borax
The purple weft bled to dye the white warp lavender
Once the odor dissipated the result is a nice scarf.

Wonder of wonders, the odor is gone! The “aged” scarves are no longer stinky. Perhaps wet finished unleashed residual chemicals that have off-gassed over time. Unless someone can enlighten me further, I’ll go with that explanation. I am please that these scarves will be wearable and the weaving of them was not in vain.

Stay well and keep weaving.

Warp On/Weave Off,

RepWeaver