Peace, Comfort and Joy to You this Holiday Season

Beaming (a Warp) with Pride

Today has been a good day: My loom is finally warped. It's a 12-yard warp, 1900-plus ends total, of 60/2 silk. It's actually two warps, since I painted 12 bouts in two different color ways and then beamed them all together to create alternating stripes. (An homage to the late Estelle Carlson, who gave a workshop to our guild on a similar technique.)

The tale is best told in pictures.

Winding the warp, with a cross at both ends:

I wound 12 warp bouts, about 160 threads each, so that the dyeing would go smoothly and the yarns were less likely to get tangled. (Emphasis on LESS likely.)

Next came the painting:

I wanted to paint two contrasting and simultaneously harmonizing color ways, inspired by the image of a Soleri bell that hangs in the Japanese maple tree in our garden. One color way moves from turquoise to teal to periwinkle to gold (the bronze bell, with a verdigris patina); the other travels from purple to burgundy to copper to olive to gold (like the autumn leaves on the Japanese maple). I want to see these colors play against each other, juxtaposed in narrow stripes on a fabric.

Next came beaming the warp, the biggest challenge of all. If it isn't beamed right, it won't weave right. And this is a very, very fussy warp.

So now it's all "on the beam," as they say. The view from the front:

It all looks so nice and neat, doesn't it? Well, it wasn't. Not at all. There are some tricks to make it easier, however. For starters, when you beam 60/2 silk, it's a good idea to forget about the lease sticks and just use a raddle -- then, when you're at the end of the warp (when the warp is nearly all on the warping beam), you insert your lease sticks, move them around behind the heddles, and start your threading. That way the silk won't get abraded or stuck in the lease sticks.

Another secret of working with very fine silk: Don't make any mistakes. I made mistakes. Long story short: I called my weaving guru, Joyce Robards, midway through the process to say some nasty things about silk. She made me feel better.

So now the warp is finally beamed, although I still have worries about how it all will weave. 

Tomorrow begins the threading....

One more image to share with you: the last honeysuckle blossom of the season, brought to you by Mother Nature, the greatest dyer of them all.

Samples from a Class on Shiva Artist Paintstiks

Last Friday at our Weaving and Fiber Arts Center (www.weaversguildofrochester.org), I taught an introductory class on oil-based paint sticks, commercially named Shiva Artist Paintstiks. They're a wonderful way to add color and interest to any fabric, as they're essentially oil paint in solid form. Once the paints are set, which takes about two days, they'll stand up to unlimited washing (except for dry cleaning, which uses solvents).

Above, you see a sample by Dana Connell, a rubbing from an Indian print block. Here are a few more samples that students created.

Iridescent silver on black fabric, from a stencil.

More images from stencils, these made using several different iridescent colors.

Free-form drawing with Paintstiks on felt.

Paintstiks and their accompanying tools are available from Dharma Trading Company as well as from Cedar Canyon Textiles. Cedar Canyon also supplies instructional books and videos to help you maximize your work with these painterly tools.

To date, I've used them on some of my hand-dyed fabrics to provide a splash of color and interest.

Who knows? Maybe someday I'll use them to paint a warp. An idea worth pondering....

Buy the Book!

In celebration of its 65^th anniversary, the Weavers' Guild of Rochester has published Weaving Lives at 65. It's a full-color book offering 33 weaving projects from the guild's 65^th anniversary exhibit last May. The full-page photos accompany weaving drafts for every project, as well as close-ups of additional pieces from our exhibit. It's a masterful display of the diversity of this guild's accomplishments in the fiber arts.

Join in the celebration of the essential role that weaving guilds play in the handmade movement in America today.

Click the link below to order your copy, which supports the teaching efforts of the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center (part of the Weavers' Guild of Rochester). And thank you!

http://www.weaversguildofrochester.org/book.php

Through Rose-Colored Glasses: Dyeing with Cochineal

Silk satin ribbon dyed with cochineal, alum mordant

Using the book Colours from Nature: A Dyer's Handbook by Jenny Dean, I dyed some fabrics with cochineal, using an alum mordant. I started with the bugs themselves and ground them up in a Krups coffee grinder. (No mortar and pestle for me -- it takes too long!) Silk takes dyes brilliantly, I've found, so it's my fabric of choice. Instant and immense gratification. The ribbon you see above was soaked for maybe two days in an alum mordant solution.

Silk gauze dyed with cochineal, alum mordant

This silk gauze (above) was dyed using the same recipe. Because the fabric is so light and airy, it doesn't have the brilliant fuschia/red that you see with the silk ribbon. Still, this delicate pink is quite lovely!

Wool locks dyed with cochineal, alum mordant

I threw these wool locks in at the last minute -- mordanted in alum for maybe 1/2 hour, no scouring, simply dyed "in the grease." Perhaps I'm seeing the results through rose-colored glasses ;) but I think they're beautiful. I'll use them in spinning, combing them out a bit with a Dutch comb and then throwing them randomly into my handspun when I'm plying. It adds a lot of interest, texture, and color, creating the hand-spinner's version of a novelty yarn.

Locks dyed with cochineal, the second sample using an iron after-mordant

I've read a bit about using various "after-mordants" such as iron or copper. Copper tends to brighten the colors, while iron will "sadden" or tone down a color. Just what is an after-mordant? It's exactly what it sounds like: After you have dyed your fiber, you place it in a bath of iron or copper or whatever you choose to alter the color after dyeing. 

And how do you create the iron bath? I used a fistful of rusty old nails and whatnot -- actually, some of them dug up by my dad as he searched the bed of the original Erie Canal. I placed them in a bucket of water, added one cup of white vinegar, and let the solution sit for about two weeks. Now I have my iron after-mordant, to be used whenever I want to "sadden" a color.

Next I have some goldenrod I gathered from a late-summer walk. I'll keep you posted on the results!

A Tale of Woad

Told mostly in pictures.

Satin silk ribbon dyed with woad

Cotton voile dyed with woad

Sheep locks dyed with woad (on left, Cotswold, and on right, Merino, I think)

The tale: Planning on an upcoming weaving project, I'm in search of turquoise -- achieved with natural dyes. This isn't easy, but a friend of mine who knows a lot about natural dyeing suggested that I start with woad and then overdye it with just a hint of yellow. From the photos I saw, woad produces a slightly more turquoise color than indigo to begin with, so I thought I'd try it out. 

First challenge: Woad is hard to come by in the United States, for some reason. Searching the web, I found a place in England, All About Woad, the work of textile artist Teresinha Roberts. I emailed my order and received it in a week or so! I followed her recipe as well. Great site. Here's the link:

http://www.woad.org.uk/

Woad has the same ingredients as indigo and has been used far longer in human history, 4000 years or more. The difference is that woad doesn't achieve quite the deep blue colors that indigo does, so indigo has become the dye of choice. You basically use the same recipe, using no mordant and creating a vat that needs to have a pH of 9 or so, dipping the fiber in and then taking it out to let oxygen do its work.

More to come, as I plan to do some overdyeing with goldenrod. Then, the quest to achieve a burgundy color with natural dyes, then gold, then olive....

A Soleri Bell Hangs in My Japanese Maple Tree...

And inspired me to weave a scarf in autumn hues. I dyed the warp -- in bouts of 60/2 silk, 24 ends each -- in shades of russet, olive, gold, and copper, along with the patina of the bell, a kind of turquoise-verdigris. Although the colors came out a bit too light for my taste, here's what the fabric looked like on the loom.

The weft is a very fine over twist wool, hand dyed in a spice-red color, and the weave structure is an 8 harness twill, in blocks of 3/1 and 1/3. Here's a closer look.

The sett is 44 ends per inch, which sounds a bit daunting, but the weaving went really fast! I'm very partial to this structure, because it's a collapse weave which, encouraged by the over twist weft, crinkles and scrunches in very interesting ways. Like this:

It's for sale in my Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/denisekovnat

And what's a Soleri bell? It's a beautiful bronze piece, weathered to a turquoise color, designed by the visionary architect Paolo Soleri. Here's a link to his site: http://www.cosanti.com