Random Acts of Color

The fabric is a cotton/linen jersey I bought from Mood (the official fabric store for Project Runway) in New York City. Above, a detail that shows a color I take great pride in: turquoise! It doesn't appear throughout, of course, but if you look at the shading on the perimeter of the golden rectangles, there it is. Turquoise is hard to achieve with natural dyes, at least for me, and yet it's one of my favorite colors.

"Sawdust, Leaves and Bugs" is what I like to call the combination, and it's the title of a course I hope to teach soon at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center. First, I immersed the entire fabric in a vat of osage orange dye, purchased from a friend, David Barnet, who is a master woodworker with the Rochester Folk Art Guild. (For more on this talented group of people, click here.) Second, I did some tying and clamping -- using techniques that are jokingly called "dirty shibori" -- before immersing it in a vat of cochineal. In this case, the …

This coat is woven with handspun overtwist singles, as I wrote about a couple of posts ago. (I did not include the blood, sweat, tears, and toil that went into it as well....)

Three kinds of wefts made three different fabrics: the checks on the front used both gold and burgundy as weft yarns, while the back was woven with only the gold yarn as weft. Which you see here.


The sleeves and inside front panel used burgundy yarn as weft -- shown below.


I am loving this coat! The fabric collapses and crinkles wonderfully, adding flexibility and interest to the garment, which is my own design. (Partly out of necessity, because I barely had enough fabric to make a jacket, let alone follow a pattern.)

I knitted the color using a brioche stitch from Barbara Walker's first volume of knitting stitches and added a Dorset button for a decorative closure. It isn't really used as a button, because I secured it with a sturdy hidden snap -- which I prefer on fabric like this, because it's ha…