Lichen Dyeing

lichen

This is a summary of my first experiment with lichen dyes.  I scraped the lichen (a flat, blue-green lichen that is common on our maple trees here) off the wood with a knife, then let it soak in a 50:50 ammonia:water bath for 6 weeks.  I used a few tablespoons of the ammonia/lichen concentrate in ~2 cups of water to make a dye bath and inserted a mini-skein of border leicester wool yarn.

Dye on left, concentrate on right.  Dyed mini-skein on ball of un-dyed wool.

The result?  A very pale, unsatisfying yellow. The dyed mini-skein is on top of an un-dyed ball of the border leicester yarn in the picture.  The mini-skein did not take up much color.

Dress Stand

This week I am getting ready to take new art to my local gallery.  I have to make sure that I get all my tags made and everything labeled right.  I also have to make sure I have all my display props ready.

I'm the only fiber artist currently at the gallery.  They do a really nice job of displaying wall art and sculptural pieces.  They aren't so good with the textiles.  

I decided that I needed a dress form to use to display my scarf.  Have you ever priced dress forms?  Ai-yi-yi!  They can be expensive!

Thankfully, we have an antique store in town.  The owner let me buy this beauty for just the right price...as a way to support the art gallery!  If you are looking for an antique store to visit, come to Crawfordsville and visit "La Rose on Main" (she's on Main street).

 And then, come visit Athens Arts (on Washington St.) and see how this lovely dress stand is being used.  The new art will be up on Aug.1st.

Natural Dyes--Rhubarb Roots

I've been working with plant materials as dye stuff.  My main resource is "Wild Color" by Jenny Dean.  It includes an reference for dyeing with the roots from the rhubarb plant.  My rhubarb plants went to seed last year and I have a number of unexpected new plants in the yard.  So, I decided to remove one older plant and experiment with it as a dye source.

Of course, I harvested the rhubarb first, and got rid of the leaves.  Then I dug up the roots, washed the dirt off them, and cut them into small pieces.  The roots were a strange texture--very spongy!  

The dye was prepared two different ways.  #1.the tea method.  Pour boiling water on the roots and let them steep overnight.  Use the liquid as the dye stuff.  After dyeing, dip in an acidic solution (vinegar works great).  The resulting color--pale yellow.  #2. the boil method.  Place the roots in a pot with water and boil them for 30-60 minutes.  Remove the roots and add wool fibers to the pot.  Return to a simmer and cook for about an hour.  Dip the fibers in a basic solution (ammonia) after dyeing, and the color turns a pale pink.

For both of these, I used approximately equal weight of fresh dye stuff to prepared wool fibers (Falkland wool roving).

Rhubarb roots and dyed Falkland wool.

Exploring Sunprints and Baskets

I haven't been doing too many big projects at home lately.  I've been working and, surprise!, am tired at the end of the day!  I did have some time off this week and tried my hand at some new things.

Baskets.  On the left is a "coiled basket" made from handspun yarn wrapped around a cotton core.  I must admit that I really tried to avoid making a coiled basket.  I didn't want to!  It was sure to be painfully slow!  Well, it wasn't terrible and I may even make another one of these days!  On the right is a woven basket.  Both warp and weft are handspun yarns.  This basket is just big enough to be used as a doll hat for a Barbie (my daughter tested it for me!).  It's a soft basket and flexible.  I'm not sure how well it would stand up if it were bigger.  I may try again on this type of basket too!

Here is a piece from one of my other experiments:

This was a piece of off-white muslin that was painted with a wash of acrylic paint and had paper snowflakes set on it.  The whole thing was placed in the sun to dry.  Apparently, as the cloth around the snowflakes (or other object like leaves or flowers) dries it wicks the paint and water from the covered areas, leaving a "sunprint".  I haven't decided how to use my printed fabric, but I think it looks cool!

Experiments--socks and egg biscuits--and a Wooden Quilt

Years ago I spun a variegated purple roving into a two ply yarn by splitting down the middle to make two similar yarns.  I thought that I was going to make mittens, and I tried once!  But the mittens were ripped out and the yarn has sat in my stash for a long time!  I decided to try some toe up socks with the yarn and I had just enough!

These were knit from Wendy D. Johnson's Toe-up Socks book, and if you look closely at my toes you can tell that I didn't follow the pattern very well!  I'm not a big fan of toe up socks.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's just because I don't have much experience with them.  At any rate, given how little yarn I had, I knew that toe-up was the way to go.  I'm pleased that they worked...I'm still not a fan of the technique.

Here's another experiment....eggs in a biscuit.  For those of you familiar with Scotch eggs (hard boiled eggs in sausage), this is the same idea, but with a biscuit around the egg.  The idea was from one of my co-workers....she was super excited to try this with soft boiled eggs.  I don't like runny yolks, so I used medium boiled eggs.  The end result...they were yummy, but not yummy enough to make them every day!  They were a lot of work!

And, lastly, a hearty congratulations to one of my associates at Athens Art Gallery.  Ben Wilson is a woodworker at the gallery and was commissioned to make this quilt from wood.  It is beautifully done!  If you are local, it is on display at the gallery for most of April.

Coverlet repair, Sampling, and Transparency

I received a surprising phone call the other day.  A woman had seen my work at the Athens Arts Gallery and was looking for a weaver's opinion regarding some family heirlooms.  We set up a time for her to come over and this is one of the things she brought--a piece from a coverlet that her great-grandmother had woven!

Even more amazing to me than the beautiful weaving was the repair job.  Do you see the faded blue rectangle in the middle of the photo?  It is a patch that was sewn onto the coverlet. ~The weaving studio at Conner Prairie recently had a reproduction coverlet that needed repair and this type of repair is precisely what we were discussing.  So amazing to see it in person! 

I've been doing some sampling for a blanket.  The weave structure is M's and W's and is from Carol Strickler's Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns.  The cool thing about these samples is that by turning the tie-up, I was able to change where the floats appeared.  In the sample on the right, the floats are in the colorful stripes.  In the middle sample, the floats are in the cream stripes.  On the left, the floats alternate in a checker board pattern from colorful to cream and back.  Unfortunately, I think that the floats are too long and need to go back to the sample warp and try again.  (On the one hand, I'm disappointed.  On the other hand, I'm grateful that I'm learning this now, and not after I put on two blankets worth of warp!)

  

The pencil is under one of the floats.

And, lastly, here is a transparency sampler that I just finished.  The background warp and weft are 40/2 linen set at 30 epi.  The pattern weft is 8/2 cotton.  I used a cartoon under the warp to help me make the pattern shapes. --Check out all the snow visible through the window.  Spring has arrived since I took this photo and that is all gone and instead, I have crocuses blooming in my sunny front yard!  Hooray!  Hooray! Hooray!

Preparing a Vest...err Shawl...err Cocoon!

Remember this warp?

And these rolags?

It only took a week or two to spin and ply the yarn.  I plied on my Louet wheel, but the spinning was on my Majacrat Little Gem II.  

And here's the weft and warp together.  The warp was woven in less than a day.  I am amazed at the speed of weaving yarn this size!  (~14 wpi and sett at 8 epi).  Once off the loom, I sewed the edges with the sewing machine so they wouldn't unravel and then I fulled the fabric to make it more stable.

The goal now is to make this into a vest....I'll be busy tomorrow!

Tomorrow came and went, but the fabric never did make it to become a vest.  I ended up making a cocoon by sewing the narrow ends of the rectangle of fabric to the top long edge to make sleeves.

The seams are at the shoulders and top of the arms.

Here's the curve of the front.

This one is currently on display (and for sale) at Athens Arts Gallery in downtown Crawfordsville.  I must admit that I think it would be great if it sold... but if it doesn't sell, then it would be mine!  Deep sigh! It's such a challenge to put my work up for sale!

More Warp Twisting and a Finished Vest

Here's a photo of my warp from the last post.  Some of the raddle sections show twisting.  Some do not.  I don't know that I did anything different from one warp chain to the next.  If, or when, I figure this out, I'll let you know what I've discovered!

This is me in a newly finished vest.  I dyed and spun the wool for this piece, then wove it as a plain weave section  and a twill weave. I haven't been able to date spinning and weaving for this.  The twill section had it's ends woven in like I learned in Joan Sheridan-Hoover's finishing class at the Michigan Fiber Festival in 2007.  So I know this fabric was finished sometime after summer 2007...  But when did I spin and weave it?  I tried to sell it as yardage numerous times.  I often thought that the twill and plain weave would make a great vest, but it wasn't until I put the twill on the front (I kept trying to use it as a yoke) that I had enough yardage to proceed.

The inside of the vest is finished with hong kong seam finishings--bias tape over the edges of the fabric at the seams.  It looks neat and clean!  Now I just have to decide if it is really mine or if I'm going to put it in the gallery for sale.

Raddle Woes--Twisting Warp Bundles

Calling all Back-to-Front warpers!  I need help!  I am winding my warp with a 1x1 threading cross at one end and a 12x12 raddle cross at the other.  When I have wound my warp onto the back beam (the raddle cross is now buried under all the layers of warp on the beam) and start to thread the heddles using my 1x1 threading cross, I get twists in the warp.  Why?

Check out this photo.  The warp was wound in small, separate chains--greens, pinks, browns.  Why are they twisted?  The entire warp chain for each color is not twisted, just the threads in each raddle space are twisted.  (Did that make sense?  If the entire warp chain were twisted, I would expect to see threads from one side of the warp chain crossed over both raddle spaces for that color.)

Anyone have any insights?

Thank you!

Rigid Foam Display Board

My textiles (mostly towels) have been displayed on a table at the art gallery.  A friend suggested that I find different ways to display them.  I took in some free standing towel rods that I used at the Farmers' Market, but I also made some display boards to hang like framed art.

First off, a big thank you to Sue Parker-Bassett from the Weaving Indiana weaver's guild.  In November she did a presentation on Leno Lace and had samples mounted on boards like these.  

These boards are made from 1/2" rigid foam insulation (~$12 for a 4'x8' panel at Home Depot).  The foam was cut to size with an exacto knife.  I fashioned duct tape hangers/tabs, then covered the front of the board with a layer of polyester batting and some black fabric.  The batting was glued and the black fabric was stapled.  A piece of wire was strung between two duct tape tabs for hanging.

Here's the backs (that's a stack of three boards).

Here's a front.

And, here are some test shots with towels pinned to the boards at the gallery:

I left the two small boards (18"x24") at the gallery, but brought the large one home.  I'll be taking it back to the gallery in Feb. for the new "hang".  The towels are pinned at the top, but not the bottom, to allow for guests to feel the textile.

Color Wrap Challenges and Happier Things

 Sometimes I find myself struggling to make a project work.  The color wrap to the left is like that.  What I think I want, what I see, and what I understand just haven't pulled together right yet.

With projects like this, I have found that stepping away and letting the project rest is good.  So, while I'm resting I'll share some things that have brought a smile to my face recently.

Kumihimo braids.  These two braids were made by my youngest daughter.  Her instructor was her oldest sister.  The yarns are all thrums.  We spent a fun hour one snow day going through my thrums finding yarns for both girls to use.  Oh, and the "extra" loops on these bracelets are for my daughter's thumbs.  Don't ask me why, but that's how she likes to wear them--on her wrist and on her thumb!

While the girls have been braiding, I have been spinning cotton.  This is one of Robin Edmundson's dyed rovings spun and plied into a 2-ply yarn.  I may even have a project for this instead of just a spot in my handspun cotton box!  I love Robin's colors and fiber preparations.  This was wonderful to spin, and I love the bright, cheery greens especially since we are in the middle of cold and snow!

This next photo is a project in the development phase.  I blended some of the bright pink silk with two colors of alpaca and spindle spun it to see if I would like the yarn....I think they are lovely yarns and I would like to weave a shawl with these.  Maybe it would be mostly brown with three narrow white bands at one edge woven in an all-over crepe twill.  Maybe it will become something else!  I need to make final decisions as to how much silk to blend with the alpaca.  I'm leaning towards 20% by weight silk to alpaca.

Swimming in Color

My colorful warp is off the loom.  It was a wonderful vacation project!  I ended up with a long sampler (~20"), a table runner, and two very different scarves.  Weaving with color has been lots of fun!

The table runner and sampler were sett at 24epi.  The warp for the runner is a black slub cotton.

 The scarves were sett at 20 epi.  Here is the short one on my model.  The warp threads were used as wefts on this piece.

The other scarf used left over yarn from Mountain Meadow Wool.  I won a prize from them in the "Look, Ma, No Sleeves" contest that Handwoven ran a few years ago.  One of the yarns (there are two light brown wools being used as alternate picks for weft) has alpaca and the other has bison blended with wool.  I think that I may get this scarf, but I'm not sure yet!

 

Franken-Inkle Loom

I have a home made inkle loom that I have loved.  Sadly, it was too small.  I couldn't even weave a full yard of band on it!  So, we franken-ized it.  I found a piece of the original board, we cut apart the little loom, inserted the board, made some connection points, and viola!  Now I can weave over two yards of inkle bands!  Yay!

(And the loom looks much better now that I have sanded it....much less "franken")

PS.  After two hours in the shop with my husband as we planned and he milled the slots, etc, we decided that it would have been easier to just buy a new board and dowel and make a new loom.  On the positive side, this little baby works just fine!

Color..Kersplash!

Do you ever feel like you're a novice swimmer jumping into the deep end when it comes to color?  Me too!  I'm on a new color journey (swim?). Here's where things stand:

The beginning.
I went shopping at my friend Robin Edmundson's etsy shop.  I love her colors for cotton roving and finally decided to buy a color I've been eyeing for months!  While looking around, I discovered she had yarn grab bags for sale as well and you chose them by color family:  "bright cool", "bright warm", "earthy cool", "earthy warm".  I don't know about you, but there are times when I want to choose every last color in a piece and other times when I just want someone to fill my bag with pretty crayons and let me play (without having to think about which crayons got put in the bag!).  So, I purchased a "bright warm" grab bag.

This is what I have left after winding a warp.  There are two fine cotton boucle yarns (~24wpi), one cotton with a binder (~24 wpi), a rayon boucle (~22 wpi), and a nylon ribbon.  They are lovely yarns!  I have woven with the fine cotton boucle before when I won one of Robin's give-aways a year ago.  The trick with this group of yarns was how to use them in my color-limited way and have them look fun, nice, and well, awesome ('cause the colors are beautiful!).

So here's what I found:  Celeste Pryde has an article in the March/April 2000 issue of Handwoven magazine where she discusses weaving a Bronson Lace "log cabin" with multiple colors.  She uses silks instead of cottons, but the color use is fascinating!  She winds mini-warp bundles--enough ends for one of her two lace blocks (24 ends in this case)--and each mini-warp has two contrasting yarns.  The contrast can be color, texture, value...or even no contrast!  For a 28" wide piece she wound ~17 of these mini-warps.

So, I'm going to try it.  I had already played around with some of my 10/2 cotton yarns, looking to find similar color combinations as this grab bag from Robin.  I pulled out all the yarns.  I made yarn pairs--most of them were contrasts of color and texture--and I wound 9 mini-warp bundles and hung them over a cupboard door.

Here they are.  I've been moving them around and taking photos of them.  I knew I wouldn't be able to remember which order I liked if I didn't document them somehow!  I pulled my husband into the project and he suggested one of these orders and I really like it.

 But, check out what happens when I grey scale these photos to look at the color values:

The color order in the top left is a gradual shift from a dark value to a light and back to dark.  None of the other value shifts are as smooth.  The middle two have a shift, but there is a more abrupt dark to light shift from the left moving to the right.  The upper left color order is currently hanging on the cupboard door.  I'll look at it again tomorrow and hopefully warp a loom!

Ends Per Inch, Errors and Summer & Winter Surprise

Ever have a 'great idea' only to watch it fail at every turn?  After weaving the placemats for my friend I thought that I could use my cotton chenille to make wonderful baby blankets.  I included a bit of plain weave sampling at the end of the placemat warp, did some calculations and went to work.

There were, of course, limiting factors in my work.  To weave a wide blanket (I like 40" square baby blankets) I would need to use my AVL Production Dobby loom.  That was ok.  I'm not very fast at warping it, mostly due to lack of practice, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to practice!  Unfortunately, I only have one reed that reaches the width of the AVL.  It's a 10-dent reed and my test piece had been woven at 24 ends per inch (epi).  I could thread the 10-dent reed 2-2-3 for 23 epi or 2-3 for 25 epi.  I opted for the "easier" 2-3 threading.

Here's where things got sticky.  I made some denting errors. Some of them I was able to fix right away, but some would have required re-threading the entire reed. (Can you see where this is going?)  I wasn't willing to do that.  I had 1150 ends.  I didn't want to re-thread the reed.  So I didn't.  

Not good. Not good at all.  So I ended up with warp stripes randomly placed throughout my baby blankets.  They aren't even.  They weren't planned.  They aren't even the same type of error!  There are multiple spots where there are too many threads per dent and one spot where there are too few.  :(

Two blankets showing denting errors.

The other part of my trouble is my choice of ends per inch for the warp.  The placemat warp had been sett at 24 epi and was a relatively narrow warp.  The washed sample is lovely--soft and fuzzy  and the colors show up well.  My baby blanket warp was sett at 25 epi and was a wide warp --44".  Wide warps don't pack as tightly as narrow warps, neither do warps with extra ends per inch.  I was doomed!

Ok.  So it's not that bad.  Sure the cloth doesn't look like my sample and I really liked my sample.  Sure the cloth has irregularities in it, so I won't put it in the art gallery for sale.  But, if I hem them, I'll have two baby blankets or lap blankets to give to friends.  If I never show them my sample, they'll never know what they're missing.  Right?

While the baby blanket warp was on the avl I got to looking through some of my back issues of Handwoven Magazine.  I was looking for articles on using color, but came across a familiar graph and paused to look it over.  

 This wall hanging is a Mary Atwater piece and I remember seeing it in her book "Recipe Book: Patterns for Handweavers".  It is designed to be woven as Summer & Winter pickup.  The interesting thing is that the instructions provide two threadings and tie-ups.  One is the typical S&W threading with tie-downs on shafts 1 and 2.  The other is a straight twill threading !!!  Wow!  I didn't know that you could do Summer & Winter on a straight twill threading!  It turns out that you can!!!

I wove this little fish at the end of my baby blanket warp which was threaded straight twill on 12 shafts. I keep hoping that I'll like weaving pick-up, but I don't yet!  Still, the ability to do various weaves on a single threading is exciting!

24 Hour Scarf Project

I had a little bit of yarn left over from the Alaska (Kenai) hat I knit.  I added an old skein of handspun--it was spun from the same fiber that I used for the color base for the top and bottom of the hat (dark brown & green sections) and it worked well as a fill-in yarn.

The piece was about 6.5" wide on the loom and sett at 8 ends per inch.  I tried a couple different wefts--first a tan, commercially spun alpaca, then a dark green with specks of red and gold handspun merino.  The dark green merino was a very fine lace weight yarn.  I ended up using it doubled--it was closer in size to the warp yarns that way--and wove away.  The project was on and off the loom in less than 24 hours!  After washing it, there was an extra 24 hours wait for it to dry.

Now the hat and scarf are a set and get worn regularly. :)

Dragon Skin (aka textured yarn and knitting)

It all started with a stop at my local yarn store.  Really, that's all it was--a stop to see what was new and what was pretty!  I came home with something only a bit unusual.  It was a length of wool roving dyed in beautiful fall colors.  There was no makers mark on the label, just the type of wool and the weight.   I thought I would look at it for a while and then put it it my stash.

But I didn't. My oldest came down with a bug that kept her home from school for two or three days.  What did I do while taking care of my sick one?  I began to spin.

This lovely merino roving was irregularly dyed.  There was no true repeat of colors.  The colors did not extend across the width of the roving.  It was very random!  I finally decided that the best way to show off these beautiful colors would be to spin the roving into a thick and thin yarn.  (This decision was heavily influenced by Sarah Anderson's book The Spinner's Book of Yarn Design, where she starts her students off by spinning thick and thin as an exercise for learning control over drafting....It's a cool trick!)  I split the roving lengthwise into strips and spun my colorful singles.  It was so much fun!  It was just spinning for the love of it! 

To keep the colors separate, I plied the thick and thin single with a thin single of black Polwarth yarn.  My friend Wendy Feller gave me this fleece and I am slowly combing through the wool.  It spins beautifully!

Here's the yarn in it's thick and thin glory!  The thick parts aren't 100% evenly spaced, but they are regular and I was pleased!

Deciding what to do with a thick and thin yarn came next.  I ended up using a Ravelry pattern "Baktus" as my starting point.  To make the piece more textured, I used stockinette stitch for the bulk of the work, but for the thick sections I purled making a pronounced bump in the fabric.  :)

Here's the scarf and a skein of yarn:

The headband is knit as a moebius strip.  I followed Cat Bordhi's cast on technique (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVnTda7F2V4 ) on a circular needle (us#5).  The piece grows from the center width-wise towards the edges.  It was a fun knit.  I had to shift from mostly knitting to mostly purling at the half-way point around the loop in order to keep the fabric all (mostly) stockinette.  The transition is just visible in the band.  My finger marks the transition point--to the right are purl stitches (the back of the stockinette fabric) to the left are knit stitches.

 By twisting the headband at the transition, the band appears to be all stockinette stitch.

Lastly, I made a pair of fingerless mitts to complete the set.  I didn't follow any one pattern to knit these.  They start with  k1 p1 ribbing at the wrists, then shift to stockinette stitch with an increase for the thumb.  After I knit enough to get to the base of the thumb, I bound off the stitches I had added in to make the hole for the thumb.  Then it was more stockinette stitch and a little bit more of k1p1 ribbing around the fingers and Ta-Da! they were done!

This seems like a lot to get from one bit of roving!  The dyed merino roving was 6 oz.  I didn't weigh how much Polwarth I used, but I'm guessing it was 3-4 oz, maybe even 5oz. For 9-12 oz of yarn, it seems more reasonable to have been able to make so much.  The best part is how much I enjoyed the making of each part!

PS.  My oldest daughter really likes dragons.  She has a few figurines, she draws them in her spare time...When I gave her the scarf and made the headband she was trying to come up with a name for them.  After a few false starts (including "sparkles"--blech!), she said "Dragon skin" and the name has stuck.  The pieces are bumpy, yet smooth and mottled, but coordinated.  And, because they are 100% wool and wool is self-extinguishing, they are partially fire proof-- definitely Dragon Skin!  :)