Magic

Just a few minutes into the first part of the wash cycle the colour begins to develop

After the first complete wash cycle the brown is now a deep rich colour and the green a warm mossy shade.

You may remember seeing pictures of this warp on the loom where the difference in colour between the warp and weft wasn't great.  At all.

The weft is the Fox Fiber natural coloured cotton.  As such it looks rather bland until after the magic of wet finishing with a high alkaline wash.

This is about 1/3 of the warp being wet finished, both green and brown.  Because the yarn isn't dyed there is no danger of fugitive dye so I don't worry about mixing two different colours in the water.

In order to get the colour as deep as possible I use a fairly high concentration of detergent plus added about 1/3 of a cup of borax to boost the pH level.

Then I used the 'soak' cycle of the washing machine, plus during the long soak I actually turned the machine off so that the cloth could soak in the machine for even longer.

With such a high pH concentration, I also set the machine for an extra rinse, just to make sure all the detergent and borax got rinsed out.

Sandra Rude has done more of a scientific approach to her towels using the Fox Fiber yarns.  I didn't think to save a 'before' sample so that I could compare to the 'after' wet finishing.  

Currently reading In These Grave Times by Jacqueline Winspear