Give Fleece a Chance!

Just a reminder to anyone out there within easy reach of Duchy Square, Princetown, that tomorrow is the Give Fleece a Chance Knit-Athon at DS Centre for Creativity. It is also Textile Friday - you can never have too much of a good thing!

On Monday, Claire Crompton and I went to visit Sandy Gilbert, www.proudyarns.co.uk to see her studio and work. We had a very enjoyable afternoon looking at sheep, angora goats, yarns, fibres and finished goods. Yummy!

Another week over and another week nearer Christmas! We have had some appalling weather and that may be responsible for the virus I've been suffering. It caused me to miss some exciting textile related jollifications: Women's Wellbeing Day in Sidmouth and KnitExpo in Exeter. I was supposed to be present/represented at both but in the end made neither.....

I'm inspired by Laverne Waddington's blog entry: http://www.backstrapweaving.blogspot.com/ and the fabulous weaving she has just seen in Peru - so many ideas, so little time!

I am experimenting with doubleweave pick-up at the moment and am getting more and more excited. I am also becoming infatuated with the idea of a drawloom....

Dying has been going well and this batch of yarn has really delighted me. The colours are Madder, from Coleur de Plantes, Cutch Waste and Dhak from Pure Tinctoria, mordanted with alum and cream of tartar on a 70% alpaca, 30% Blueface Leicester yarn from John Arbon: wwwjarbon.com. Glorious yarn and the dyeing has been fantastic.

I have some more in a different colourway but the skeins need tidying up before I photograph them.

The other really exciting thing that is happening in the dyeing part of my life is that I am going to ISEND next April. This will be a fantastic event and I am lucky to be going with several colleagues and friends - that always helps!

Another busy week has come to an end and I look back at all the things I promised myself would be done, and haven't!

On Thursday afternoon I went with Philippa and Laura, colleagues from Duchy Square, www.duchysquare.org, to be interviewed on Radio Devon. Our interviewer was Fitz (David Fitzgerald) and if you should be interested, you can listen again online until Tuesday. We talked about Duchy Square Centre for Creativity, what it's for, what it is like being there and I got in a plug for using local fleece.

On Friday I ran a morning workshop for some of Peter Tavy Guild's weavers on how to read a weave draft. The discussion generated over the yummy soup and rolls lunch provided by Hilary, has resulted in our forming a weave study group. Striking while the iron is hot, I turned up at the Guild the following day with a challenge!

We are going to weave a minimum of 20 x 20 cm (8 x 8) samples, using only straight entry and black, white, grey and one colour for the warp. If all 10 of us do our bit, we shall have 80 samples to inspect in January. It will be really fascinating to see how different they will all be.

Tomorrow I am going to teach Lucie Ponsford (www.giselledesigns.co.uk) natural dyeing. Lucie is a fantastic designer and she upcycles old clothes into the most fabulous new creations. Wednesday I am going to help a friend put up her new-to-her loom, Thursday a meeting with Claire Crompton, knitwear designer par excellence and creator of the Give Fleece a Chance (www.clairecrompton.co.uk) project, Friday is Duchy Square Christmas Fair in the evening, and then on Saturday I will be in two places at once....I will be in one and my presence will be represented in the other as I have yet to master the ability to split myself in two.

I hope to find time to experiment with some delicious steel yarn I was given, so watch this space!

Phew!

Well, Duchy Square Textile Fair has been and gone and was a rip-roaring success! We had some wonderful stalls, including Handweavers Gallery: www.handweavers.co.uk , Fiery Felts, www.fieryfelts.co.uk , KnitExpo, www.knitexpo.co.uk and many others - google Duchy Square Textile Fair for a complete list.

Now I have to get on with the work that has been piling up, including some weaving samples for Giles and Joanna of Avocet Alpacas, a double weave blanket in natural dyes for me - probably! - more dye experiments, work for the Christmas fairs that are rapidly coming up, and planning for the Fleece First exhibition that is being curated by my good friend Isabella Whitworth and will be held at the end of next year at Devon Guild of Craftsmen.

2011 will be a great year - the regular teaching visit to The Netherlands with Alison Daykin, Amanda Hannaford and I and next time we are delighted that Helen Melvin is joining the team. Then ISEND in La Rochelle in April, then the Fleece First exhibition in the autumn - all wonderful opportunities.

So rather than sitting in front of a computer, I should really do some work!

Time Flies...

Over a month since the last post, and a lot has happened, very exciting news for next year so watch this space......



The moths and caterpillars are finally over for this year, at last. We found one or two escapees who had cocooned in strange places - one in the recycling bin and how he got there is a real mystery. The silk crop for this year has been good and I have combed most of it out into lovely, long, lustrous fibre. Now I have to decide how to use it. Though I have managed to do a small sample from each variety to show with the moth when doing talks.

I have today had a bit of a dye fest - I've dyed a kilo each of madder and cutch, some cochineal, some dhak, mordented some top and some more yarn and am about to put some commercial silk fibre in the pot to mordant for the up and coming Textile Traders Day at Duchy Square. It's the 29th and 30th October, if anyone would like to come and see all the wonderful stuff on display and for sale there - after all, Christmas is coming.... Most of the dyeing is for me, but I have just put a kg of indigo dyed dk yarn in the post for a lady in Sussex.

Off to check the dyepots and will try to remember to keep a bit more up to date with the blog, but time will tell.

Autumn is upon us!

Well, it seems as if the summer is on its way out as the nights are drawing in, the evenings are getting chillier and the early morning is adorned with dewdropped cobwebs. I'm fed up with cooking the apples that are r apidly falling from the Grendier apple tree though will be grateful for them later in the winter when I can dig them out of the freezer.

The caterpillars are all cocooned now, apart from the last two - there are always a couple that keep hanging on till the bitter end but I suspect they are about to spin and I will be extremely glad to have my dining room table back! So the cocoon and dye fridge will be full again.

On the dye front, I am about to harvest my Japanese indigo, grown from plants supplied by my good friend, Isabella Whitworth (www.isabellawhitworth.co.uk) , and hope to get some turquoise on silk as well as some blue. Last week Isabella used my studio at Duchy Square to cook her leaves and the amount of blue obtained looked extremely promising. I also have the last few woad plants to deal with.

I am waiting for some more mohair yarn, as the throw was so successful that other people have commissioned one - the fab fibre comes from another good friend, Lesley Prior, (www.devonfinefibres.co.uk) or more accurately, from her goats!
I also have to whip up some tapestry samples - though anyone who knows about tapestry will instantly understand that it can't be 'whipped up,' for a forthcoming tapestry course I have been asked to teach for the local education authority in Tavistock. It is entirely possible that this won't have sufficient numbers to run but one has to be prepared in any event. And the samples will be useful and fun to do - stretch the old brain a bit!

Our Textile Fridays - last Friday of the month at Duchy Square - are growing from strength to strength and I hope the Textile Fair that we are running in conjunction with the October Friday (29th and 30th) will attract a lot of people for the traders who are coming - should be wonderful fun, apart from anything else.

I have some old sheeting in the washing machine at the moment that I am going to dye as a contribution to Nick Viney's forthcoming exhibition at Duchy Square so I had better trot off and fish it out - it is destined for the indigo vat!

More shortly!

Time marches on...

Seems like a long time since I have added to the blog but I have not been idle. Over the past few weeks I have been weaving a throw, mohair, double width, finished size 200 x 200 (believe my arms have grown several inches!), had a delightful student for a week learning natural dyeing and gathered increasing amounts of foliage for the caterpillars.

The first photo is of one of my moths, taken through the netting of the cage. It dims the colour somewhat but she was rather agitated so did not want to open the cage and distress her further. The second photo is of a caterpillar who hasn't quite got the idea of what he is supposed to do! He has pupated without bothering to spin a cocoon first. As he is an Eri Silkmoth and his silk was destined to be part of a project, I am a bit disappointed that he has decided to skip the silk and go straight to metamorphasis. When this happens, as it does occasionally, it is usually because the caterpillars haven't had enough food, and therefore energy, to spin. All I can say to that is he and his companions had fresh food at all times and my privet is looking remarkably bare after the depredatations of feeding this batch.

I have Zara's permission to put the photos of her dyeing experiments on the blog so here are just a few of them:

Top left is woad; middle is myrobalan; far right is silk screen printed indigo

Bottom left is top to bottom : cochineal, cutch waste and annatto. Bottom right is silk screen printed red lac.

We both had a very good time, and I wish there was room here to show you the other 20 photos!

Now I must go and wind a sample warp for double weave alpaca......back soon!