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FUZZY GALORE |
I hope you caught our article on
acid dyes
in knitty's Summer issue. We're always bursting with pride when we have the
priviledge of being included in such a great mag, especially when the cover
is such an incredible, mind-boggling beach skirt!!
Love Annie Modesitt's Aline bag too, what incredible texture...
Apart from that, we haven't been doing as much fiber stuff as all that. It's film festival season, always a very busy time, and I haven't gotten the hang of Dave's trick, knitting socks in the dark. Mostly we've been finishing up a couple items to show and, you're in luck :-), writing up patterns.
How about a knitted version of Susie Hodge's
fleece boa? We didn't have
enough mohair for a canonical experiment, but Lincoln is working out almost better.
And while we love last year's red
crocheted Fuzzy bag, everyone's been hounding us for
a knitted version. This one features
a very elegant black and greys colorways, and is if anything even easier.
Rose finished in 3 days, and mostly knitting on the bus on the way to work.
Don't think I'd remembered to mention the
web lace scarf either. I'm usually
totally lace-impaired, but I adore that
new yarn, it's so... downright weird :-).
Meanwhile, check out this totally surreal show on
spinning dog hair
that I caught by chance on NPR. I wonder whether the Catalan stories on dogs and
the expulsion of Jews might actually be true,
but I'm boggled by the concept of the dog having to be happy.
I've heard people who spin dog hair complain that it's a
very emotionally draining occupation, since many people get them the fur
when the dog is either already dead or on their last leg, and how delivery of a
beautiful item often causes floods of tears. So does that mean that
most of the US dog-hair spinning can lead to karmic misery for the wearer?
Sheesh. And how about the sheep, how happy do the sheep have to be?
I do try to meet the sheep whose wool I spin (Buffy, at the moment,
a super-pampered specimen from Ranchito del Sol in Sebastopol),
but I don't feel quite that much in tune with them.
They are, after all, poor things, not the
brighest bulb in the animal kingdom box, not the sharpest pencil,
a few sandwiches short of an animal picnic...
Mind you, I'm not at all opposed to dog hair spinning in general. I can't personally do it, because it's been years since dog dander has started wrecking havock with my bronchioles, but it's fine with me if others want to. I understand the sentimental value, considering even the best of dogs don't last nearly long enough. Still, I have to say that dog hair is one of the inescapable drawbacks of spinning life. Many people, who otherwise know nothing of fiber, will leap on any unsuspecting stray spinner and produce bags of usually filthy, matted dog hair, sometimes decades old. Cat people are usually more sensible. It's akin to the comments about checkbook balancing that mathematicians are constantly subjected to (as if!). Along the same lines, I usually try to keep up my sleeve the name of good alterations places, so I can dodge requests for hems from strangers, since I much prefer to spend my time sewing something new, or at least mending my own damn pants. So I was very happy to find VIP Fibers in the booth next to Spindles & Flyers at Stitches in March 03. Great fluffy yarns, very nicely done, and of course no doggy smell. Totally professional operation. I'm happy to refer to them everyone who brings up the topic of dog hair, and I recommend that every spinner keep their address handy :-).
Sigh. We have a knitting failure to report... There's an almost-done sweater that had been sitting around for a long while, a couple months. In my experience, it's always a bad sign, and this one seems to be living up to that curse. One grinds to a halt when the ol'subconcious detects that something is falling headfirst into the pit of failure. This one was an update of an old Crystal Palace pattern, an interesting and very quick one with alternating bands of reverse stockinette in a 10 ½ needles, and seed stich on 15s. We used a fairly narrow ribbon, the look was great, sort of granitey (and I say that as someone who's sick to death of the current landlord craze of granite counters). Rose was making it for me, always a very pleasant thing to contemplate :-).
The first hint that something was wrong was that she started it five times. Gauge swatches weren't working too well, because of the varying needle size, and because the ribbon was very stretchy and sagged dramatically even when the swatch seemed fine. So we took off at least 8" (20cm) between the first and second rev. Then when it seemed to be about the right size we had further trouble fiddling with needle size, before finding a dual gauge that seemed vaguely lacey but wasn't completely obscene. Not to mention and of compatible weights.
She got all the way up the back. She worked some pretty decent
short rows for bust shaping, after we
We've been suffering through another flurry of house reorganization lately - making room for the floor loom we picked up used at CNCH set if off. It's probably going to end up named Brunhilde, as a big hulking blonde, but that's another topic. This overlapped an attempt to clear up the bedroom clothes problem which led to a makeshift closet addition that incidentally allowed for clearing out a dresser, which in turn took in several boxes of fabric languishing unseen in the sweatshop (excuse me, Studio) since last Fall, and also led to a new batch of better-looking cardboard boxes from Ikea to organize the too-small-to-organize stuff on the recently cleared shelves... It's one of those finger-in-the-gears things that balloon till all you want to do is find some congenial film festival and never be home long enough to look at anything in the house. I'm sure it'll be good for our character in the long run, and it has led to several projects resurfacing, including the ribbon stripes.
So today, after a run around our local Haight St Fair checking out the hemp items, African beads, and cheap Indian imports (great barbecue though), we came home all fired up to do something constructively crafty. And Rose took out the sweater and made me try it again. She didn't like it. She said furthermore she would never wear it herself, even if it fit her better. I told her we could finish it long enough to take a picture and publish the pattern, and find someone else to give it to, since 5 rippings seemed quite enough for one project, even for a speed demon knitter like herself. Then, still feeling like it was perhaps a bit tight for me, I made her try it on. It's not too tight on her, but she's right, it's still truly unflattering. No, let's be honest, it's a dog...
Why? It seems so unfair. We like the yarn, the colors are good, the texture is interesting, there doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with the pattern... I think it's probably some sort of bad fit between the drapiness of the fabric and the pattern. I don't know, I have to think more about it. But I think it'd definitely headed for another, final, round of ripping. We'll have to brace ourselves for a last try-on beforehand, trying to be more analytical and clear-headed about what's going on, try to figure out something that'll be good for that yarn, try to figure out a better yarn for that pattern. If you're going to have a big fat dog, you should at least learn something from it.
Rose then took out another sweater, one which to vary our torments was turning out too small for her, and which has been held up unfinished for nearly a year if I'm not mistaken. She ripped it at blinding speed, she grabbed some Fizz, and she's starting a knitted version of the Fuzzy bag instead. She's got enough handspun already for a couple sweaters, so banging her head on bad fit with some plain black yarn seems sort of counter-productive, she's right. I'm kind of feeling the same about plain color yarns lately :-).
On my side, I need to get spinning on the blue/gold project. But I've also decided that I'm going to have the first project on the new loom be the short bit of upholstery that I was contemplating a year ago when I started using up my limited loom time doing stupid projects instead. I've got the warp all spun up, so I won't be held up too much on that. It's lovely white Lincoln from Sandy McCabe in Covelo. I have another grey one from her which will make matching weft, and which I'll spin 'backwards' (single S, plied Z) so it packs tighter. I think that what I've learned this year about sett will make it a better project, come to think of it I probably will need to spin some more warp to allow for something tighter than I initially planned. Still, I think this one can come out OK, and it's kind of human size, I ought to be able to get through it in the foreseeable future...
Finally getting around to dealing with an interesting dye experiment. When we said we went to take a workshop with Sara Lamb, about a month ago, we didn't really mean a proper workshop. This wasn't a very structured time, everyone had been previously formally trained by Sara in the intricacies of reproducible results. We just met in someone's great garage in the woods, Sara had gallons of primary colors ready, and we tossed dye around at everything that'd sit still long enough. We'd brought all kinds of items, from balls of yarn to fabric, and I discovered the joys of baggie dyeing. I'd read about this already in 'Color by Accident' by Ann Johnston, a book aimed at quilters. It made a lot of sense for fabric, but it hadn't occured to me to apply it to yarn and fleece. I was totally wrong! It works just as well, if not better because later spinning or knitting can rearrange the color distribution which is otherwise set in the fabric. Not only that, but the book uses fiber-reactive Procyon-type dyes, which I think are a pain, and this works much better with acid dyes, much less fuss. You just steam the baggie when you're done with your thing (and in this case we used zipped gallon bags).
We were so heated up after dyeing several balls, a scarf and more yarn
in baggies that we attacked the half-fleece we'd brought in a wholesale way.
There were about 2lb of lustrous white corriedale, I believe it was Buffy,
from Jan and Eva's Ranchito del Sol in Sebastopol.
We had grabbed it on the way out the door in case we ran out of stuff to dye.
So why mess around?
We dyed the whole thing in a big Space Bag, as is. We looked through
Sara's dye sample book, and picked a progression where we liked not
only the end colors but every color in between, in this case gold
to brilliant blue. We'd soaked the fleece in hot water with a shot
of Dawn, we put it back mostly drained in the space bag which it still pretty much
filled. We poured blue at the end, let it soak in, and then poured in
gold toward the top, reasoning that the blue would otherwise overcome
the gold. Then we sealed the bag, and mushed things around.
As could be expected, most of it turned green. But we do have a few
handfuls of the extreme colors, and much that's tending toward one or
the other. We slopped the bag back and forth, turning it over
without putting it on end, till we were afraid
the whole thing would turn green, then we let it soak for days.
We brought the space bag home without further processing, it'd have taken up an entire huge pot and then some to steam it and space was at a premium. Then I proceeded to steam it one baggie at a time. Sigh. It only took about.. 3 days altogether, once I got into it. But I'm glad, I didn't want more eetty-bitty samples to use up. I was giving 3 baggies at a time at least an hour's steam to make sure we'd get all the color possible set in. And I tried to steam the colors separately, so they would remain distinct. I drained the extra dye from all but the last 2 baggies, not wanting the whole thing to turn the same green in the process. In the end we still had a bit too much pastel for my tastes so, inspired by Nancy Finn's use of toning, I overdyed a couple baggie's worth in black, which turned out really black rather than the more subtle tones I had envisioned. I figured that it'd give more depth and complexity to the mix, and so far it looks like a good idea. I also didn't get rid of all the pastels, remembering that quilts are better from a wider range of values. And it's harder to do this in a workshop where all the dyes are diluted at 1%, not the more intense 3% that I'd normally prefer. I think after carding we'll have about the right depth of color in about the right proportions. Although 'right' is a fiction at this point, it's totally a crapshoot, but whatever, I think we can fake it. [And no, there's no brown in it, that's Juliette with the tail, helping along, isn't she cute?].
So it's definitely going to make a sweater. Perhaps a rather short sweater, since there isn't really that much fleece if I spin it bulky, and it'll never be a sweater if I don't. I've been mulling over possibilities. One would be having blue at the wrists and gold at the neck, and some sort of progression in between. Or maybe a sweater knit from wrist to wrist, with one wrist gold and one blue? One kind of naturally thinks of the darker green/black gravitating to the bottom. Another strong possibility would be a domino sweater - less of a pain to knit than entrelacs, but a good way to keep colors distinct. I don't feel too confident about my ability to do an even color progression, and I'm sort of enclined to try to keep the colors distinct, after all this work getting a good variety of them I want to see them all. So that means either singles or navajo-plying. Singles would work well in the Deb Mentz ('Color in Spinning' from Interweave) way, and I don't think the sweater would creep sideways too badly if I knit it in dominos, which is another argument for them. Clearly this needs more thought, but I trust something will come up before we're done carding it all, much less spinning it.
The ugly bag is growing on me more and more. It's perfect to carry a bunch of yarn around. It went to the library and came home with 30lb of books (not that it'd do that for long, no way would either the stitching or the fabric stand that kind of strain on a regular basis). It's not great to go on BART as an extra bag, because neither the light color not the inlays would do well in prolonged contact with dirty floors. But I'm generally quite happy with the fact that I can use it, and hardly see the ugly bits any more. Amazing how function can override form to that extent!
In the first flush of happiness about doing anything with it, I forgot to give you the technical details... And those are important in this case. I followed Sandra Betzina's advice and fused interfacing all over the back before even cutting into it. Some kind of Easy-Knit generic variation. It flattened the inlays a bit, but it stabilized the whole thing enough that it didn't disintegrate on contact, especially in the parts with long floats from bad weaving, when I was right up against the knots. It also gave the bag enough body that it doesn't hang pitifully flat when empty. I do have philosophical qualms about fusing plastics to handwovens in general, and would try to avoid it, it's a bit like pouring canned tomato sauce over handmade fresh pasta. But when you've produced a technical dog as well as an esthetic one, it's a very good way to save it into at least useability.
When in a sewing bind, I always check what Sandra has to say... I particularly love her 'fabric savvy' book, which is filled with great advice about strange fabrics - why struggle when she's figured it all out for you? Some of the advice can seem almost horrifying, at first glance, like not threading elastic bobbin thread through the bobbin case when hemming Slinky knits. But she's not a fussy sort of woman, into tortured solutions for their own sake, if she tells you to do something outlandish it's because she's ripped her own hair out over this, and found something that really works. So when I've ripped twice, I've learned to put down the offending item and check what Sandra says, and try out her tricks before I go on frustrating myself needlessly.
I finished the bag in a hurry, and whipped it to school right in time for final evaluation. Then I came home and ripped it. Not just because I'm incapable of making anything without ripping :-). What happened is that while I tried to give bigger seam allowances to the lining it still came out longer than the bag by about an inch. Not a big deal, but the lining had a tendancy to poof out or to get bunched up at the bottom, which I didn't like. So all I had to do was take out the top seam that attached the bag and lining, and fold away more of the lining. While I was at it, I added a couple functional nits. Instead of stuffing the handles way down, which didn't really make them more secure, I made them as long as possible, because I realized that I could almost get them over my shoulder in the first rev. This didn't turn it into a real shoulder bag, my fabric wasn't wide enough for that no matter what, but it made it possible to worm my arm in when my hands are really full with other things. And finally I thought that while the body had pleasant texture, the top edge had a bit too much of a tendancy to droop. So I took strips of really heavy non-fusible interfacing, folded them in half, and sewed them in to the top when I redid it. I was more careful about sewing back and forth across the handles in that last rev too, so hopefully I won't have to take that seam out again :-).
I should probably have washed that fabric before I made anything with it. As have commented several real weavers since. But to do it some good I'd have had to throw the cotton into a washer and dryer. And that would have hopelessly matted the wool inlay. Oops. Should think more carefully about mixing materials next time. This reminds me of the Supplex jacket I've been inflicting on my friends for something like 8 years now. Still going strong, mostly looking good except that the lower-quality lining is looking a bit rusty in the hood, where the sun's faded it. The worst is that every time I wash it, I have to take a Sharpie to the cotton-covered piping, which is shredding very whitely through the initial black. Who knew the rest of it would last so long? And that I'd be too lazy to make a replacement soon enough.
Well! I'm still reeling with surprise. All those years of sewing, and
I had this deep prejudice about how you just couldn't get any better
than your original fabric. Kind of like cooking actually - my
grandmother would always say 'it can't be bad, all the ingredients
were good', and I did believe that. The drawback of course would
be that your cooking/sewing can't work well if you start with
awful ingredients. And yet look at this bag, doesn't it look
like something you might not be entirely ashamed to be seen with in public?
On a galloping horse, of course, as Priscilla's grandmother would
specify for her part, but still. I feel like a talented WWII cook
who's just made something deeelicious with rutabaga and a single
teaspoon of margarine.
And yet, I started with that... stuff that I wove, and bored you complaining about just a few days ago. Not only that, but I used every bit of it! After I decided that I should make a bag out of it (no wall hangings if I can help it), it became clear that I didn't have really enough fabric. The scale of the motifs wouldn't have lent itself well at all with a tiny passport-scale bag. And I liked Rose's suggestion of something to store carded rolags in, or something suitable for one of those too-big-to-schlep projects.
So the 'good' part was only big enough for the front and back. It's a shame that the progression of inlays got lost in the turning from one side to the next, but I can always inflict the story on likely victims, if I can't keep it bottled up. I cut up the inlay attempts for side pieces, to hell with consistency, and I'm letting them hang out in what turns out is quite a visible spot. I was going to fold them discreetly to the inside, but the bag would get too small for its intended uses. Finally, I even used the part that I only did with some kind of awful acrilyc filler, in order to get to the print faster. Can you tell the handles aren't woven from the same yarn? Me neither. And this is actually a good thing, since the acrylic is thicker and stiffer, both good qualities in a handle. I had an inlay experiment in there too, the orange, but it's more visually discreet there than anywhere else. I'm even sorry that I don't have a bit more, since longer handles would go over my shoulder easier, but I don't really intend to carry it much.
To top this off, I burrowed in my box of quilt prints, and found enough
of this perfectly nice fabric for the lining and pockets (pockets are
just as mandatory in bags as in pants, don't argue with me there).
I think I'd decided at some point that
it'd be a bit too crisp to wear, and that the color would be too blah
for me. But the fossil fishes work well enough thematically,
the color livens things up without overwhelming the outside,
and I'm totally pleased with it. I also got that lovely Puritan
glow from using up something I already had. Since I've spent the
last couple days reorganizing the bedroom and hall closet,
this is even more keenly appreciated.
Not to mention I believe that I was well over the 5 years fabric
depreciation limit, in other words it was free :-).
Well, the assiduous blogger is back... PacBell has been mucking on a daily basis with our phone lines, some sort of 'upgrade', and our net access has been rather intermittent, to put it politely. To add to that, I seem to be in one of those spaces where everything that can go wrong does, fiber-wise and other-wise. Like the first week where the phone went wrong was also the one where the car spent 3 days in the shop (you can imagine the bill!) and the sink was topped off with someone else's soup-like leavings from a balky garbage disposal. Looove that modern technology. A too-long stretch of eventful weekends are also taking their toll, leaping out of bed to have fun being kind of an oxymoron for some of us. We're ready to do nothing but a little light knitting for a bit, at most accompanied with a few bars of chocolate and some silly movies. Sad however that unless you're really, really good at not looking at what you're doing it's impossible to knit to subtitled movies.
So the big event is that the semester is drawing to a close, and
that I managed to squeak by and take my printed/inlay weaving off the
loom, just in time for the final potluck. This is not too bad a
performance, if you consider that I just barely got it warped
before Spring break. Of course, it helped that I only wound a bit over
2 yards[ ed. note: actually Rose wound the warp..],
and then proceeded to effectively print only about a yard
and a half. And then I printed badly at first, too crooked and
too faint, and proceeded to print the better stuff right into
the knots, where it could hardly be woven,
so it's not like I had a lot of warp to work with...
I was positively revolted when I first cut it off, but fortunately it's growing on me a bit after a couple days:-). If you recall that I was trying to do something in the spirit of raffia weavings from Zaire, you can see from the results that I didn't get quite close enough. I've considered overdying the whole thing with gold to make the colors at least closer to what I hoped, but I think it's kind of throwing good time after bad. Nothing is going to really disguise the icky printing, the clumsy inlay, and the bad weaving.
So, to try to be objective, some things did go right. In retrospect, I'm very glad of my decision to tilt the original by 45o, to print the grid on the diagonal and to weave in square inlays. It'd have been a horror trying to weave squares on the bias, I'm really not up to that at all. And I did well also in picking out a simple bold motif to screen, the more complex ones that other people attempted generally didn't come out too well. Considering that it was pretty much my first silk-screen, sticking to simple was definitely the thing to do. So I'll give myself 2 points for knowing my own limits ;-).
And I was almost outright clever in a couple places too. The first was in figuring out in advance that the print was going to be diluted by the weft, if you see what I mean, so I tried for contrast, even if I didn't quite achieve it. Then I noticed that people were knotting up the ends before printing without lining up the end loops. The teacher made a big point of how it doesn't matter at all whether the knots are lined up at the same level, which is entirely true. As long as the knots are pretty much even in tension, ie you don't have some using up an inch more warp than others, the level they're at from the end of the loops is immaterial. But it seemed to me that lining up the end loops would be important, that otherwise it'd be impossible to get the design to line up again when you got it on the loom, inevitably the loops would even themselves out and you'd get vertical disorder.
I tried to ask about that at the time, but the teacher was too caught up in explaining the topology of her other point to get what I was driving at (people were really disbelieving of her point, since they perceived it to be a mathematical concept the usual shutdown happened). We talked about it this week again, as she was wondering why my printing came out clearer than most, even allowing for its initial lack of detail. She had assumed that people would 'naturally' tug and even out the loops, but I saw people in action not doing it, too happy at being told there was something they didn't have to pay attention to :-). Eh. But the complex designs that most others attempted unfortunately had a tendancy to turn into blobs. Not necessarily a bad thing, someone printed hands and instead inlaid some leaves on the resulting blobs, a very creative solution that might even have turned out better than the initial intention.
Something else I did right was notice quickly that my printing wasn't going well. The point of us using dyes for the printing was that the teacher had experimented with paints, and found that only half the thread was getting colored, and subsequently they'd roll and only about half your printing would be turned to the top of your fabric, greatly diluting the effect. So she thought that using dyes would allow us to saturate the warp enough that more of the printing would be visible. Good idea, but as it turned out she had to make our dye solutions early enough to be ready for us to print fast, and then we got all tangled up, literally, and we ended up spreading out the printing over almost a month. I printed about 2 weeks after the initial mixing, when the sodium alginate had gotten much gummier than initially.
So after I printed the fist couple motifs, I looked closely and saw that my dye was sitting on top of the warp, practically as if it was paint. Merde! Not the idea, so I started diluting it. Of course, this was a dangerous tack to take, since I could easily have gotten big runs under the screen, or the whole thing could have started to bleed, which wasn't the effect I wanted either. I pretty much diluted each level of motifs a bit more, with the result that the last one was really pretty good, and the print looks the same on both sides of the fabric. But of course that was the one that was practically in the knots...
I'd also screwed up because instead of mixing the dark brown that I was aiming for I settled for the already mixed 'bronze' which sounded so good, but only gave me a medium-value olive instead. I could tell this as I was printing, but I thought hopefully that maybe it'd get better as it dried. After all, when I paint the color I want it doesn't stay that way at all as it dries, so maybe if I didn't get what I wanted up front it'd be practically obligated to dry the desired shade, right :-)? But in short I wanted much more contrast than I printed, and the piece would have been much better for it. Good thing that I got good dye penetration from diluting it, and managed to keep it all in line quite well, otherwise the whole thing would have disappeared entirely. In my opinion, there are too many things that can go wrong with this process...
I could have gotten away with a lighter print too if I hadn't had quite so much contrast with the inlay, which makes the print look even paler by comparison. But I started with a test inlay of pale grey, and hated it, it was too cool in tone. I thought when I started that I had the perfect dark brown, but it turns out I was thinking of the corriedale fleece that made a vest instead of a sweater because I ran out of every bit of it... So all I had left was this nearly black Lincoln, lovely stuff but too dark for this piece. Sigh.
But intensifying the printing turned out to be one of those things that falls right where it should. Since I was bored with the inlay from the start, I'd quickly decided to spin progressively fatter yarns for it, so that after the initial somewhat fine single, I'd go through several plies and boucle, and finish in an apotheosis of outright shaggy knotted pile. This was a bit nerve-wracking, something else I don't like about weaving as a medium is that you're going about these harebrained ideas with no way to check them till you're off the loom, since you can only see a few inches at a time. I never got to peek at more than 2 inlays at a time, and chewed my fingernails about whether I was going to regret this. I didn't get a good grip on either the progression of thickness or the alignment, and had some doubts about exactly how many motifs I had printed, not to mention whether I could even use the last one. Anyway, by some utter miracle as I was thickening the inlay I was going in the direction of intensifying print, something which I had no clue about till I cut the thing off the loom. Whew. Looks like a great design feature, doesn't it :-)?
And then some things went dreadfully wrong. Tension was a nightmare throughout. Every time I advanced an inch I had to pretty much rearrange everything, since the supplemental warp exterted uneven tension and caused huge unevenness in the ground warp under it. The loom was not what could be hoped for either, a small flighty Harrisville that couldn't hold a setting to save its life, with harnesses bopping all over and tricky ratchets, and the beating power of a paper fan. My selvage threads went wrong almost from the start, and even with all kinds of hardware hanging off them I never got them presentable.
I think that my sett was wrong too, I tried to look it up but I didn't have a good reference, no hard numbers, and possibly a couple more ends per inch might have made a difference. But maybe it was hopeless, and the addition of the supplemental warp and uneven globs of fat inlay doomed any attempt at a good fabric. It didn't help that I only had 4 harness and was restricted to plain weave too, I could possibly have fudged it better with a fancy twill. As it is, I made the kind of sleazy over-loose fabric that gives handwovens a bad name. I think the only hope for using it will have to start with the icky expedient of glueing fusible interfacing all over the back of it. And I left the dark grey supplemental warp in its kind of irregular sleyed state, liking the effect, but didn't bank it on it getting into a hideous and visible mess toward the end, as bottles were running amuck trying to climb over the back beam in the headlong rush toward the knots. Finally, the last few inches of weaving are positively shameful, as I tried to work the shuttle through a non-existent shed, with every tension problem exacerbated, and caused all kinds of untoward floats in my effort to get to the end of the only really well-printed motif. No interfacing will cover this up.
So, well, this is nothing much to look at. I've pretty much decided that printing on a warp is too iffy, and that inlays are too much of a pain for me to endure in anything but the smallest doses. I think the thing is ugly, and it certainely does not do justice to the original that I liked so much. At most I might manage to make a bag out of it, something not too offensive to hold carded rolags in an upgrade of the usual paper bag. But on the whole, it was an educational experience - even if I learned that I didn't like those techniques, I did learn something about them, and I'd certainely not have tried them on my own. And the learning process wasn't as painful as it could be, the level of teacher guidance was excellent, the student cooperation added a lot, I don't like the result but I certainely enjoyed the process. I didn't loathe the whole thing like I did last semester. Sigh. We'll just have to declare progress...
Had a good time last weekend, going to a proper Easter picnic, and I threw together this
lovely hat in 15mn. You need a perfectly blah straw hat to start,
in this case still waiting
for an interesting cardwoven band. Use a medium safety pin to attach the back
of a little stuffed lamb to a roughly folded up piece of tulle, leftover
from Trinh's wedding dress if I'm not mistaken, ie 45" x 1/2 yd. Every knitting
household, in my experience, has at least one stuffed lamb lying about, it's
an occupational hazard. The lamb
goes in the middle of a deep pleat, and if possible assumes a fetching
Nutcraker pose (what? wrong season? who cares?). Then the whole thing
gets wrapped around the hat, tightly, and the ends get wrapped together
a couple times, aiming up. A large safety pin holds the knot together, that's
the punk part. Then the ends, which otherwise would trail quite far,
too far for a San Francisco windy day perhaps,
are artistically gathered and skewered with a garage-sale hat-pin.
Voila. I ought to have had a very large chocolate Easter egg for this...
Taking off for another dyeing workshop, this time with Sara Lamb in Grass Valley. No doubt you're thinking by now that you wish you saw real objects made up of all these dyed fibers, but you'll just have to wait a little while :-). I'm bringing fabric too this time, silk since we'll be using acid dyes.
I know, I shouldn't be regurgitating net stuff, but I got a really excellent one today from Anne, as always way up there in the ranks of joke providers... No trace alas of the Crafty Genius who came up with these.
"Pad-About Slippers.
You need four maxis to make a pair.
Two of them get laid out flat, for the foot part.
The other two wrap around the toe area to form the top.
Tape or glue each side of the top pieces to the bottom of the
foot part.
Decorate the tops with whatever you desire, silk flowers, etc.
:-). Now I would quibble with the 'environmentally safe' heading, as one of the weirdos who's actually taken apart those things and catalogued the contents, I would say it's plainly not true. But Rose also points out that the mopping feature is particularly good when you have a geriatric kitty who's given to leaving presents by the litter box, and by extension the human box.
I would add that this gem is really special coming from the woman who years ago, when we were roomates, made me the Tampon Warning Necklace. Her thesis was that I was pretty good at warning people up front that PMS was in effect and they'd be better off leaving me alone. But alas, they might forget as the days went on, and slip and say something which ordinarily wouldn't matter, and... The less said about that part the better, imho, but the point is that Anne cleverly decided that a more permanent visual reminder would be helpful to everyone, myself included. So she whipped out a few tampons, did a very realistic job on them with two separate shades of red markers, knotted them together, and voila! a fetching necklace that that'd help maintain household harmony by its very presence. I highly recommend this method, I used it for years. The only drawback was the time where I rushed off somewhere in my usual hare-brained manner, finally noticed that people were looking at me really strangely when I hopped on the bus, and realized that I'd forgotten to take it off before leaving the house... This was probably the only time where I managed to make people positively bug-eyed in San Francisco, where the competition was fierce at the time :-).
On a more fiber-y subject, I had great sewing success this week.
I'm sweltering in my new shirt, which should be perfect as
soon as the sun sets and the temperature drops. We're told there will
be rain on Sunday, so I'll get a bit of use out of it before summer.
This started
with a piece of blah wool jersey whose origins recede in the dim
reaches of far-away sales. Its main thing was that it was a
very early-80s kind of icky blueish green, probably passe by
the time I even acquired it in a spastic fit of 'economy'. I think I'd originally
meant it as muslin material. It was sitting
by the door waiting for a final trip to
SCRAP,
when I had the bright idea to experiment with it instead.
We have Spring break this week, so weaving didn't absorb all my
free fiber time as usual.
I first serged some meandering vertical lines through the whole piece, without any planning. In retrospect, I could have made the lines a bit closer together, would have gotten more going on in the middle where it belongs. Eh. Then I gave it a bit of agitation in the bucket, without any obvious results. I boiled up a big pot of Jacquard 'brilliant blue' dye. Since I wanted a light-shibori effect, not too much contrast but not totally even, I didn't soak the fabric long and squeezed it damp before immersing it completely, I had the water simmering before I put it in, and I used an excessive amount of vinegar. This worked like a charm, the dye struck really quickly to the fabric it got to first, and the extra long simmering only turned the whole thing a lighter shade of blue, blurring the edges and eradicating the original color completely. Then, impatient with its still near-original texture, I threw it unsupervised in the dryer, which really did a good job of fulling it at last. At that point I could have gotten into my usual paralysis about not messing up a good piece of fabric, but a few moth holes helped me get over this :-). And since I'd started with too much, I had a good yard and a half left to play with after fulling.
I'd just visited Paula and tried on a great wool t-shirt of hers, with lettuce edge at the bottom and cuffs. It seemed like a good idea to avoid making thick hems on this already pretty substantial fabric, and the lettuce part would go well thematically with the wiggly fulled lines. So all I had to do was to dig out an old pattern (originally Sandra Betzina's Vogue 7264) already revised for my latest sloper, re-thread the #$@$@# serger several times over, and we were off. How would one possibly revise such a hyper-simple pattern you wonder? Easy - you cut the front armhole one size larger so there's a hint of ease where a dart ought to be, and add a bit to the center front length for the same purpose. Then you cut the top/back shoulder one size larger down to the elbow to accomodate the hunched old-geek posture, and you're done. Sounds like nothing really, but it makes a big difference compared to what you'd get even from a better-designed pattern like Sandra's, not to mention what you'd buy in a store (shudder!).
I flubbed the neck a bit, having intended it to be flat but unaccountably making the join in the middle front, which of course wobbles a bit. But with all the other intentional wobbling going on I don't think anyone else will notice. The lettuce bit was a bit iffy, it was my first try at it and I wasn't willing to re-thread from scratch again for 2 yards of seam. I practiced a lot on the scraps, pulling like a maniac, finally deciding that any further lettucing will have to come from future washings. And Rose asked afterwards whether I liked 3/4 sleeves, at which point I had to confess that while I don't mind them, these ones came about because they were a couple inches too short for long ones. Eh again. I'd made a violet version of this shirt a couple winters ago, but it didn't last long, itself the victim of inappropriate fulling. I liked it a lot though, it was very comfortable, a good weight for San Francisco, and even looked reasonably good, so I'm glad it has a much more interesting successor.
Went to a really cool lecture by Harald Boehmer, one of the founders of the DOBAG project. He's a chemist who analyzed old Turkish textiles by modern methods in order to figure out what plants/mordants were used to dye them. In cooperation with his wife Renate and Sherife ? from the University of Marmara's textile department, they set out in the 80s to form rural cooperatives and teach weavers how to use natural dyes again. They have since been producing from handspun wool the most incredible carpets, that rival anything ever produced in the region. Only since they're not antiques they're merely ruinously expensive rather than totally out of reach ;-).
I bought my own with the money I got when I my mother died, feeling that I wanted something concrete to remember her instead (beside the cat to pee on it, who alas won't last as long). And I thought she'd approve on every possible level: a beautiful textile, rooted in Middle Eastern antiques, stunning but practical, in the colors she taught me to appreciate, a project combining sciences with arts, and one that clearly benefited women while bringing a bit of fair trade to its area. It's clearly a winner, I'm very grateful to Frederique for introducing me to the gallery (as well as to my first Amish quilts years ago), and I'm still very happy with the decision. Don't worry, the cat doesn't go in that room.
To get back to dyeing, Dr Boehmer has just written a book that I highly recommend as the most complete I've ever seen on natural dyes: 'Koekboya, natural dyes and textiles, a colorful journey from Tukey to India and beyond.' (ISBN 3-936713-01-4) Koekboya means 'root dyed' in Turkish, and it's an adjective that'll drive the price of a rug up steeply... although of course it's now applied to every rug in the Istanbul bazaar :-). The book is a bit light on Africa, mostly because he hasn't gone there, although it does include some examples. But it has a lot of examples from Indian block printing and South East Asian weavings of all kinds. One of his co-authors is Charlotte Kwoon, who runs Maiwa Handprints, a great gallery in Vancouver and incidentally a good source of dyeing materials (although more locally Carolina Homespun just got a large shipment of Indian freeze-dyed indigo).
This is the very best kind of fiber books - you get as usual gorgeous photographs of what can be accomplished, from antiques to modern interpretations. And then you get pages and pages of solid information about specific dye plants, including color photos of each one (indispensible for the woman you might remember from the last entry as the Ace Botanist), Latin, common English and local names, what specific molecules are at work. Ditto for dye insects, snails etc with a summary of their life cycle. You get good physics explanations of how color works and the physiology of its perception. You get accurate drawings of the dye molecules, in case you should have access to a lab, examples of chromatograms, discussion of chemical differences between various indigo and madder varieties. This is accompanied by lists of most common ways to get specific colors with detailed recipes including water temperature, pH, and mordanting on various fibers (which are also briefly discussed). You even get the recipe for the famous Turkey red, which shows clearly why people were willing to pay so much for it because it's such a -huge- pain to accomplish! In short, this is the book to end all natural dyeing books, you can pretty much spend the rest of your life exploring this.
I was rather entertained by the fact that Dr Boehmer, and his introductory LA other Dr whose name I promptly forgot, while meticulously and soberly turned out, were both wearing quite noticeable ties. Dr Boehmer told us the story about his hot pink one, which started with the search for the elusive kermes from Mt Ararat. The first expedition was decimated by Souleiman's revenge and left without a single stray insect. The second, led by a French expert, was more successful because it was at the right season (September) and just before sunrise they had no difficulty collecting lots of mating kermes wriggling on the ground. Alas, it turned out that they were not quite dead yet, so they had to be collected all over again from the inside of the bus back in Marmara. In fact, nothing would kill them short of roasting them, which brought hungry university colleagues down the hall looking for 'the kebabs' that smelled so good. Clearly a versatile insect, when you can get it... The other Doktor was sporting a very fine, more sedately dark purple, example of Japanese shibori for his tie, and he gleefully announced to me that it was dyed with cochenille. Wish I'd been wearing anything half as interesting...
Aaah. Notice how fixated I've been with color lately? So do I. Nothing wrong with it :-). Maybe I'll get to muck with my not-so-good blue/green silk from last week over this weekend, if I don't have to sacrifice the whole weekend to taxes, or better yet as a reward for getting them done.
Also went to weaving guild meeting, where I got to gossip with guild-mates who are still taking the other weaving class at City College, and to compare notes on projects. I got to admire some new scarves and bags of theirs, very smart. They'd noticed my Oeuvre In Progress themselves, and kindly didn't say anything about barely getting warped before Spring break. My take on it so far is that I was glad to try my hand at screen printing, but I like slopping dye around in the usual warp painting better, and prefer the results. As to the inlay part, the less said the better. The best I can come up with is that it's clearly a tribute to what a good teacher Janice Sullivan is that all our projects look very different and individual... I loathed threading the supplemental warp. Then I didn't want an extra half-yard of plain weave hanging down where I didn't think to print, so this week I whipped it out with filler and tried my hand at an inlay. Glad I experimented before the real thing, because it's in fact quite hard to get the thing to lay down where it should and not get pushed over by even the lightest beating. Don't like the way it looks. It's abysmally slow. WHY?? Because I'd never have done it outside class, clearly ;-).
Sigh. Let's not get into why the past few weeks haven't been very conducive to writing in the blog, or for that matter to assiduously working on fiber projects... I only did a few things in a desultory sort of way, but finally I had a great time this weekend that I just have to blab about.
Nancy Finn (Chasing Rainbows, Willits CA) was teaching a dyeing workshop in Napa,
and I just had to get there, even though the geriatric catsitting is still
such a problem. Nancy, who's been doing (reproducible!) luscious color
combinations for nearly 20 years, was very disciplined about the whole thing :-),
and we spent the first day doing color gradations. We used small strips
of silk, which I hadn't seen done before, and that makes a lot of sense
from her since silk is clearly her favorite fiber. It's also interesting
because you can get silk a lot whiter than the usual 'white' wool fleece.
It made a nice complement
to the wool gradations I've done before too, since the same dyes do turn out quite
different on different fibers.
The very interesting part was that we worked mostly from secondary gradations, ie first we did some straight red-to-yellow, yellow-to-blue, blue-to-red gradations, then we did variations on them. Most color classes start at primaries and make you do stuff to them ad nauseam, not leaving much time for study of secondaries. I'd read about but not really registered the difference between tones, where you add a complement, and shades, where you add some black. The results are related, but they aren't really the same. Did I make it clear that if say you were going from red to yellow, you'd get a tone by adding blue, the other primary? We were using a standard of 8 units of dye, 1/4ts in our case since we were dyeing such small quantities, and we'd add 1/4ts of the other stuff to the whole gradation in turn.
We got quite confused at some of that, and there was a fair amount of throwing out of strips that clearly hadn't gotten their full complement of dyes :-). I have an unfair advantage in that I can keep more or less on track by counting in French, which still supercedes English counting in my mind and doesn't confuse others even if they are fairly good French speakers. But I usually have to use the egg shells as a visual aid when I'm making an omelette, so you can imagine how I'd do with eight 1/4ts. Any interruption or lapse into counting aloud tended to result in ripples of mistakes through the table. It's very focused business... In retrospect, I had a much easier time with Sara Lamb's method of using the metric system, and recycled syringes to measure out the desired quantities in one shot. And I have no doubt that it'd come out more accurately too, not only because of the counting problem but because of the difficulty of filling a 1/4ts perfectly.
One fascinating exercise consisted in first dyeing the strips with a toner, which turned them exactly the color of tussah silk I have. Then the same colors were overdyed on that, and came out very different looking, much softer. A very useful thing to practice, I wish we'd had time to do all the gradations like that too! I certainely have a much easier time getting to the deep dark Tibetan reds I like when I start with the light brown fleece Paula gave us, so this is a good way to cheat when you're starting from a real white.
The next day Nancy demonstrated how she dyes herself. Her husband used to be in the restaurant business, and she's adapted some of that equipment very cleverly. She started with those big stainless-steel trays because she didn't like to use as much plastic wrap as we often do, which makes a lot of sense in her case (she uses a dozen gallons of vinegar a week, if that gives you an idea of the size of her operations...). So she'd lay her fiber in a 2" pan, layer it with a 4" pan with water in it and a lid, put the whole thing on a double hotplate, and have a very efficient double boiler. Now that she's doing so much of it, she still dyes 2oz at a time, she's got all her formulas (dye quantity and width of stripes) worked out for that. But she's also got a big steaming table in her studio, so she does a pan and puts it on to steam, does the next one, and by the time she's filled them all she's ready to start again on the first one. It takes only about 15mn to 'cook' a pan of 2oz, but she checks that it's done by lifting the fiber and making sure any juice still in there is completely clear.
I was curious to see how she is quite organized about the laying on of colors too. She lays her fiber neatly filling the bottom of the pan in regular rows, and paints in straight perpendicular strips of varying widths. I didn't think the color was so regular, it doesn't look like it in the skein. She also seems to achieve very unblurred color changes, compared to some I've seen or done, even between unrelated colors, and even though she works with damp fiber. I think that's because she's only using as much liquid as she needs to dye, and there is no sloshing around, she merely presses the dye in with her (gloved of course) fingers. It was good to see her in action with both wool and silk, since wool allows color to sort of sponge and smear along in a way that silk doesn't, the silk absorbs the dye pretty much where it hits (unless it runs on, which is easy to control). For that reason I think she uses more water with the silk, till it's pretty sopping wet. I mean vinegar water of course, a 3:1 solution which she uses about half and half with the dye solution.
Her color combinations are very complex. She showed us how she gets inspired by photos, pointed out that many of the contemporary ones at least make use of complementary schemes. She basically doesn't use any color straight, everything is toned or shaded or both, which surprised me because many of her colors are both intense and light, something which I didn't realize could still be achieved like this. Obviously, a light hand with the toning color is a prerequisite.... I also noticed that almost every combination seemed to have some black in it, even if in small quantities, which goes along with what my mother described as good painting when I was still in grade school :-). Nancy's theory is that straight secondaries are just too simplistic. And seeing her results you'd have to agree with her!
But as you see I think I need a lot more practice...
The orange roving started with some blah 100% scarlet
dyed roving which I inherited because someone didn't like the boring results -
I left some of the bright pink in, but mopped most of it with
yellow, washed all that in sections with dilute blue and/or black,
threw in a generous stripe of the orange slop bucket, everyone's
combined leftovers, and highlighted it with some pretty straight black.
I like the results, even though the black seems to have evaporated.
The blue and green scheme I copied from a Vogue
shoe ad, because I loved the colors and wanted to practice brights.
I did half on a merino/silk blend, and half on all-silk, which will
give some nice subtle variation in texture with a ply each.
I paid attention to matching my silk strips carefully, I measured
the dye, I tried to reproduce the page proportions of the colors,
and it was too controlled. Even though straight primaries were
what seemed clearly to be called for, I now think that the colors
do look too simplistic. Maybe before using it I should give it
a wash in a very dilute red, and see whether there's improvement?
Meanwhile almost all of my fiber energy has gone to writing up patterns
rather than actually doing anything (I'm still barely halfway through the crochet
top). I put up the pattern for the
fuzzy crochet bag that's had everyone
salivating when I bring my knitting along in it. It's very fuzzy, in the best sense
of the term ;-).
I also put up the pattern for the
surprise bag I recently finished.
That one was more complex, if only because the shape is much more elaborate,
but I feel happy about how I got good stitch patterns to emphasize the shape,
and how the little fuzzy trim makes a nice surprise when you open it.
This one is more usable as a real daily bag. As the idiot who got her
wallet stolen from the outside pocket of her backpack on the bus
twice in the same year, I feel like I have a unique design
perspective...
Finally the most useful, nice thing I've done lately is to make a
fleece ball for the birds,
just in time for spring.
We've got a whole colony of mourning doves, which I adore,
they remind me of the best of my grandmother's house.
And a whole lot of hummingbirds who love the bushes with the
little purple flowers (some botanist, eh?). Let's see if
we can keep them coming around...
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Winter 03 <-- || --> Summer 03
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