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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
