Sampling, in Search of Beautiful Cloth

 

Way back in the misty past -- that is, about two years ago, my memory being what it is -- I was flying out of Rochester on my way to teach a workshop. As it happened, I had a beautiful view out the window looking east over the Finger Lakes. They're a series of 11 lakes in western New York State that all stretch north to south, long and lean, like fingers. (In the image below, you can see them in the winter and you can sort of see where I live, in Rochester, NY, in the top left-hand corner of the photo, with Irondequoit Bay flowing south and Lake Ontario filling the northern left half of the photo.)

Above, from NASA, a satellite photo of the Finger Lakes region in winter. Public domain.

They really are way more beautiful than this, especially when you're on one, in a boat or on a dock or in the water, in the summer, in a bathing suit on a sunny day. Some of my fondest memories come from these lakes, especially Canandaigua and Keuka, both close to my home, where I learned to waterski, and tried to sail, and swam and floated and tanned and roasted marshmallows and threw sticks -- or stones -- for dogs.... (Our beloved boxer, Bruno, seemed to think he could retrieve a rock after it was thrown into a lake that was full of them.)

But back to weaving. After seeing that view and reminiscing, I opened my computer and started to design a draft with many variations, based on my feeling for the Finger Lakes. (Background: I have a 32-shaft loom and I love designing curves for 4-end parallel threadings with lots of colors.) Here are some of the variations I came up with, all on the same threading. The draft at the beginning of this blog post is my favorite, which I've named "Finger Lakes Summer."

These drafts are, from top to bottom, "Finger Lakes Farewell," 

"September," "Spring," and "Storm."

Finding the right warp has been a real challenge. I started with with 50/2 linen (or something close to that, not absolutely sure) that I dyed in natural dyes to resemble the colors seen in lake water.

Nice, right? Wrong!

This is how they looked when I started weaving one of the "Finger Lakes" designs.

Blah and bland, even when I used red in the weft.

And then, we had a flood in our house. I'm not kidding. How is it that I'm weaving up a warp using water colors, and it doesn't work at all, and a pipe bursts in our house and floods the better part of two floors? Coincidence? I think not.

I'm telling you, this was no fun at all.

You don't know the half of it.

Fortunately, my looms -- and my husband's pianos -- were unharmed. I don't know how that happened, but they were fine. Next, only slightly deterred (and living out of a hotel), I cut off the linen warp, which was a first for me. It just wasn't going to work. I know, it's linen... but I was in no mood to put extra work into this one. So, like Goldilocks, I went in the opposite direction: I wound a new warp in a much heavier linen, 16/1, in much brighter colors.

Nice, right? Wrong again!

Dare I write this? This warp was also a clunker. The yarns were just too heavy for the patterns, although the colors were fine. At this point, I'm realizing just how important materials are to the success of a project....

Not working for me. At all.

Yes, dear reader (if you're still with me), I cut this one off too. That makes the second warp I've cut off in my weaving career. 

By now, these missteps had taken up the better part of eight or nine months, what with living in a hotel for three months, keeping on top of the home repairs, and teaching workshops (mostly on Zoom, during the winter). I'm not sure what possessed me, but I decided to press on. It's not even that I thought these designs were so great... maybe it was just curiosity, wondering whether I could get even one or two good patterns out of the dozen or so I had designed. 

Well, long story short (even though the story is already long, it could go on much longer), I finally went back to my go-to yarn for these 4-color Echo designs: 16/2 cotton (or sometimes bamboo/rayon, depending on what colors are available). The ensuing saga involves tying on a warp, not knowing what I was doing, adding a cross, figuring out that a raddle might be nice, making lots of errors, and having to fix my Megado because shafts were sticking.

BUT, although the story still isn't over, I've at last found one pattern that seems to work! And the warp grist is right and my loom is running fine (thanks to my clever spouse).

I prefer the top part of the sample, with warmer hues in the weft. But not sure. 

Ignore the treadling error about a third of the way up in the photo.

Below is a detail of the drawdown. The pattern is Jin and, while you may not be able to see it, there are actually two colors in the weft, which is not traditional. Typically, there is one color in the weft, but I've learned that using two colors adds richness to the overall color mixing. For the top part of the sample pictured above, I alternated red and golden orange for wefts. 

A detail of the drawdown

The moral of this tale is that you learn a lot from your mistakes. Way more than you learn from success, in my view. I've learned that materials are foundational to what we do. I've learned that it's good to break the rules (in my case, using two colors in the weft when weaving Jin). I've learned that it's OK to cut off a warp (or two).... I've learned that the best-laid plans don't always work out but if you adapt and persist and shift your goals, you might come up with something worthwhile.

I guess I've learned overall that weaving isn't easy! Well, occasionally it is, but you can never tell what the weaving goddesses have planned for you....

Thanks for reading!

Studying 'Lustrous Linens' with Kati Reeder Meek

Sorry for the smaller sized photos, but I took them with my iPhone! Last week, the Weavers' Guild of Rochester hosted a workshop with the wonderful Kati Reeder Meek, author of Reflections from a Flaxen Past, master weaver, and inventor of better warping with the weaving trapeze. The photo above is a sample from the workshop, described as a four-shaft damask, woven with linen warp and weft.

Linen has a character all its own: less forgiving and far more rigid than wool, cotton or silk, but in so many ways more lustrous, durable, and pattern-friendly than almost any other fiber. I have always loved linen, as it harks back to centuries-old weaving and spinning techniques and comes straight from the fields. So ancient and so basic to human needs.

Here are a few more samples from the workshop. (I don't give anybody's name here, because some people would prefer that their names aren't broadcast over the internet -- so we'll let the weavings speak for themselves.)

This one, above, is a bit blurry, but I hope you get the picture. This is a four-harness 17th-century Lithuanian pattern -- a one-shuttle weave that uses tabby throughout.

Above, the weaver used 30/1 linen in both warp and weft. It's woven in plain weave, in a thick-and-thin pattern where four threads are woven as one for all threads on harness 4 and then for every fourth pick. (That is, you thread a straight draw on four harnesses, threading four ends through every heddle on the fourth harness and then, as you weave harnesses one and three against two and four, weave one pick four times every fourth pick. If you want the draft, I can send it to you, because it sounds far more complicated than it is.)

Both samples above are using the same pattern, but with yarns of different weights and colors. It's based on a 19th-century Lithuanian pattern for eight shafts, in two blocks of point twill. So pretty! The first photo is hard to make out, I realize, but the colors alone work well.

Kati Meek calls this a "trouser twill," derived from a pattern on a fragment of fabric from a Lithuanian man's trousers. It's a 2/2 twill in two colors, perhaps not for trousers this time.

My pattern was a gauzy off-white fabric with varied denting -- which I chose in hopes of making curtains for my kitchen, which we are updating. (And boy does it need updating.) Here it is, below, in a photo taken after I had cut the sample off of the loom, washed it, and "cold mangled" it with a marble rolling pin.

Why did I enthusiastically take Kati's class -- if I'm a weaver of collapse-weave fabrics that, unlike linen fabrics, forgive a multitude of sins? Because I love linen fiber, I hope to weave more of it, and, above all, this class revisited so many basic techniques to teach us new, better approaches. Thank you, Kati!

And maybe I will soon weave some new kitchen curtains, also thanks to Kati.

Scenes from a Class on Shibori with Natural Dyes

Two samples of arashi shibori on cotton by Joan Rusitzky, 

using osage orange (gold color) and indigo.

"Sawdust, Leaves, and Bugs: Shibori with Natural Dyes" is the full name of the class, a workshop I taught over the weekend at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center. Students brought in cellulose fabric (cotton, linen, rayon, and silk) for dyeing in three different vats: osage orange (for golden yellow), cochineal (for magenta) and indigo. We also did some discharging of dyes, using RIT Color Remover.

The results were wonderful. Students went from vat to vat, clamping, tying, stitching, folding, and otherwise creating shibori resists that allowed colors to blend or contrast in a number of patterns.

Above: Barbara Mauger dyed a silk scarf, beginning with a base of osage orange 

(made lemon yellow because it was simmering in a copper pot), 

then clamping with spiral forms and finally dipping in an indigo vat. 

The red color on the lowest spiral comes 

from a bit of old dye that was still on the spiral resist.

We learned that natural dyes could successfully be discharged using RIT Color Remover. I had used this often on man-made dyes but had no practice on natural dyes. Nor could I find anything online to document that it would work. So we found out for ourselves that it was effective, with the vat being hot enough (about 160 degrees Fahrenheit) and enough time elapsing (at least 15 minutes) for the fabric to sit in the vat. Another insight: Michel Garcia recommends that cotton fibers will work better in natural dyes if they are pre-mordanted in aluminum acetate rather than the traditional aluminum sulfate mordant. I looked this up online and found that an over-the-counter pharmaceutical product, commercially named Domeboro, is made of aluminum acetate. That's what we used, at approximately one package of Domeboro per one ounce of fabric. It worked great!

Typically, it's hard to get saturated colors on cotton fabric using natural dyes. I believe (and this is not based on research but rather on my own assessment) that it does help intensify the colors.

Eleanor Hartquist used long cords to scrunch up her fabric, 

which we think was either cotton or linen. Not sure. 

The brown color you see here was a base color, 

achieved by dipping first in osage orange and next in cochineal.

Eleanor's fabric, after immersing in cochineal once again, then opening the fabric, 

 then again folding and clamping it and immersing it in indigo.

On the final day of class, just for fun, I made a vat of onion-skin dye, which produces a lovely golden/rust color. Below is a photo of some silk yarn that Eleanor decided to wrap (an Ikat technique) and immerse in the onion skin dye.

Eleanor's onion-skin-dyed yarn, using Ikat techniques. The color in this photo 

may be skewing a bit toward the red end of the spectrum, but you get the idea! 

Lots of fun and color for a December weekend. I'm thinking of presenting anther workshop along these lines in the future, perhaps using madder, onion skins, and woad. Let's see, that would have to be named "Roots, Peels, and Leaves...."