Quick organic indigo vats

Well, the banana vat pictures are finally downloaded, along with the henna vat that I made this afternoon. After blogging, I shall go and make the iron vat and hope to spend some merry hours doing some printing with it tomorrow.

These are the mashed bananas with one of the skins to show how black they had become - I was surprised the bananas were still edible! They'd been in the kitchen for at least 8 weeks....though as we were away, the heating was off, there was no cooking or washing being done, so in Feb/March the room must have been like a fridge.

The vat, containing indigo, calcium hydroxide (slaked lime) and mashed bananas - I forgot to weigh the bananas before I mashed them, and then couldn't be bothered, so the

quantities are possibly not as well matched as they should be (1-2-3, indigo, lime, fruit), but Michel says that fruit is not going to be as measurable for fructose content as fructose powder is, so one has to use one's judgement. Obviously that is what I must have done!

The first dip in the vat, 10 minutes after it was made (these vats reduce instantly), and the second and third dips after about 30 minutes. The second dip was followed with the material being plunged into a bowl of clean water till the green changed to blue, then straight back into the vat again for a minute.

The henna vat is made with 10g indigo powder, really well wetted out, 20g calcium hydroxide and 30g henna powder - I bought mine from an organic beauty shop and it is intended for hair colouration.

I added the indigo to 2 l of boiling water, then the henna and finally the lime, gave all a gentle stir and in less than a minute, the blue froth and metallic flower had appeared on the surface.

The cloth dipped in this vat, though it is still damp and difficult to be sure, looks a deeper blue than the previous vats. This is  my recollection of what happened at Michel's workshop.

Another New Year Resolution gone down the Swanee!

Well, I was determined to keep up-to-date with the blog in 2012 but life has a way of throwing curve balls....

My studio was in a building called Duchy Square Centre for Creative Arts. Sadly, the operators of the building have gone into voluntary liquidation so I am currently working from home, and am blessed that my good friend Nick Viney has at last got planning permission to convert her stable block into a teaching space, so by the end of May, courses should be back on the agenda.
My house is not quite big enough to contain all the stuff that was in it before the studio equipment moved back, so we are living in a permanent obstacle course...

Had a fabulous trip to Australia and New Zealand to visit various family members. I had the great fun of meeting up with Anne Field and attending a Christchurch Spinners' meeting, plus all the family stuff, though getting an email from the liquidators telling me to render them an account of money I might be owed, during our first week away wasn't the best way to begin a holiday. Wish I hadn't taken the laptop!

I am overwhelmed with new design ideas, some of which may appear on the blog during the next few months, relating to landscape and fauna. I had an encounter with a deadly poisonous spider, a funnel-web, and a non-venomous but still scary python. Spiders don't bother me in the slightest, even poisonous ones but snakes are vile! For me, it is 8 legs good, no legs bad.
I was privileged to meet a tuatara, a prehistoric lizard-like creature that takes 90 years (they think) to become old enough to breed and may live for 200 years. The one we saw was a mere 25, so a baby.

Back home, having sorted out all the post-liquidation crisis and having had a trip to The Netherlands to teach silk spinning and Whacky Fibres, I came home to find some truly black bananas. As no-one wished to eat them, I decided to make an indigo vat using Michel Garcia's banana recipe (you can substitute other sweet fruits if you prefer to make banana cake!) and to my surprise and delight, it worked! And the conservatory smells delicious. Pix to follow.

Time, too, to inspect the oak for leaf development. I have cocoons in the fridge and they will need to come out fairly soon as we get back on the silk rearing conveyor belt again. Time to plant the Japanese indigo, check the woad, inspect the weld....then it will be shearing again and why haven't I finished last year's fleeces yet? Life is never dull!

Musings

This is a time of year when we traditionally look both back at what has happened and forward to what may come. It has been a busy year for me, with wonderful opportunities but I am increasingly wondering who I am, as a textile artist. I wasn't even sure what I meant by the question when I thought about it, usually in the shower.....





I think back to those people who have had enormous influence over me, things they have said, things I have seen them do and how I view them. I was very struck by one of my first teachers telling me that she sees things in numbers: if she is planting a flowerbed she will see 7 tulips, nine daffodils, three iris and twenty-one crocus. When that is sorted in her mind, she will move on to the subtlties of colour, texture, spacing and timing of flowering. When I repeated this apparently bizarre account to another weaving friend, she said: "Well, don't you see it like that?!"





No, I certainly don't! But I wonder now about how I do see things, and if I was planting that same flowerbed, how I would visualize it right at the beginning? And I realise that I see things initially as textile, or aspects thereof. I look at a catkin and see a braid, I look at bourgainvillea arch and see a shawl, in silk. I look at a painting and my brain automatically begins to translate it into cloth, yarn and dye. A flower will be a subtley shaded, naturally dyed fleece; a skyscraper will be a repp woven mat; popcorn will be a textured yarn.





I like to do everything from scratch and, stupidly, feel that if every aspect of an item hasn't been produced from the raw material (scoured, carded/combed, spun, dyed and knitted or woven) by me, it has somehow failed a test I set myself. I am, however, realising that if I want to produce more textiles, I need to give myself permission to use commercially spun and dyed yarn - after all, I have no problem with my friends and colleagues using these 'short cuts.' And the skills of dyeing and weaving are valuable and satisfying in their own right.





A very happy celebration and 2012 to you all

Long time, no blog

Well, what a lot has happened since I last put in an appearance on this page!

Fleece First is up, running and nearly over - finishes next week for those of you near Bovey Tracey who haven't seen it yet; I've managed to crack the lampas weave and finish my sample from Jetta Vandermain's course in - well, some months ago....

Since then I have been on two more courses - one extreme to the other, you might say. Ann Richards with collapse weave making very fine, delicate samples; and Jason Collingwood making fab rug samples. Both of these, in their different ways, made me very happy and I will be taking pix at some time in the near future and showing you what I have achieved.

In the meantime, here is a photo of the woven fabric in the exhibition:

What happened to my resolution to update the blog every week without fail?! Life, I suppose. I am still spinning madly away to get the yarn done for the fabric and when that is finished, the dyeing and weaving are still to do.

This is the colour sample on the loom - the blue is woad and the brown walnut. The yarn is Bluefaced Leicester, combed on English woolcombs - hard work! - and spun worsted. I've currently spun just over half the warp.

Combing - you can see the unwashed fleece on the floor, though the fibres were clean when I combed them

Pulling the fibres through the diz - this preparation is more than worth the work - properly combed sliver is a joy to spin.

Fibre Fest was a busy weekend for us and it was very nice to see lots of old friends there and make new ones. The silk workshop went well and it was particularly nice to have Maria from Moscow there, though I haven't been able to suggest what she can do with 10kg of carrier rods! Well, I have given her suggestions but I think she has a lifetime's supply...

Last weekend was a family party, and lovely to see so many relatives- though a bit of a shock to see that a gorgeous baby I remember is now 6 and at school! Still gorgeous, of course, but he might appreciate my saying that!

The bee-keeper is currently in occupation in the kitchen and is quietly delighted at the amount of honey he has this year, despite the weather being unhelpful for these wonderful little creatures. I really don't think the world in general appreciates insects as much as we should.

Next week, if anyone is in the Tavistock area, I will be spinning at the Alexander Centre on Monday afternoon - teaching, so there's still time to sign up, indigo dyeing on Tuesday, likewise, and helping with textile design on Thursday.

Tomorrow is Fleece Fair day at Dulverton - see Devon Fine Fibres webpage for details. I shall be there with spinning wheel, spindles and assorted spinning and weaving gear, so maybe see some of you there? It is an opportunity in particular for farmers to see how we use their fibre.

Am I the only one whose inbox is filling with suggestions of what to buy friends and family for Christmas? The children haven't one back to school after the summer break yet and already the rush to part us from our money has begun.

Well, it's a while since I updated this blog because I have been getting some much needed inspiration and education and preparing a major piece of work for Fleece First, an exhibition to be held at Devon Guild of Craftsmen in September, October and November. September is next month.....

First the silkworms. They are all but two in their cocoons now and I won't be raising any more this year as the oak is not good and my privet bushes for the Samia have taken a bit of a hammering and need to regenerate.

I've been on two marvellous courses, one weaving, one dyeing. Weaving first - Jette Vandermain from Canada came to Devon Weavers Workshop to teach a course on Lampas, a structure I had never tried before. It is totally fascinating and has such possibilities. My sample warp is still on the loom and I am longing to finish it, not least because I will be doing a course with Ann Richards in September and already have my high twist yarns and instructions for making the warp......Plus a recents small bequest has enabled the purchase of a mechanical Magic Dobby loom and I'm longing to have a go with it!

The other course was with Michel Garcia, natural dyer extrodinaire. I had been one of the mob surrounding his instant, organic indigo vat at ISEND and was delighted to hear that he would be teaching at the National Quilt Festival at the NEC.

We made vats with bananas and indigo, henna and indigo, indigo balls, metallic vats (not organic, but non-polluting). We made resists, we overdyed with madder, cochineal, weld (found in a field near the NEC!) and an indigo paste we could paint with. Absolute bliss!

The picture shows some of the resist effects: white on blue, and mordant resists with weld and madder

Inbetween all this excitement we had a family wedding in Wales, beautiful bride, handsome groom, lovely countryside - shame about the rain but it was Wales in August!

Now I have a week, nearly, to get ready for FibreFest, so back to the dyepost, spinning wheel and loom and hope to see some of you there!

Sunshine and showers

Well, the weather is behaving in the way to which we have become accustomed - rain, then scorching dry days and then more rain and chilly winds. The Japanese indigo doesn't seem to mind, and I've already had one very successful woad vat from a plant that decided to spend the year in the polytunnel! Lovely blues, and I will be doing a woad vat on Wednesday with Claire Crompton, of Give Fleece a Chance fame.

This week I have been trying to make a start on my project for the Fleece First Exhibition to be held at Devon Guild of Craftsmen, in the autumn. I'm using Bluefaced Leicester fleece, from a local farmer, Neil Coles, and will be combing the fibres on English woolcombs in a traditional preparation. It will be woven on my Delta loom but the yarn design and weave technique are still at the mulling over stage - the adrenaline is beginning to kick in, so hopefully this time next week there will be something positive to report.

The photo shows the fibres at the bottom with the combed sliver on the left and the noil (waste from combing) on the right. I have to make dye decisions too - woad is obviously on my mind so maybe that will be the colour to choose.

My a.pyrni caterpillars are now the size of my index finger and they have gone quite pale, so I hope that they will be spinning soon. The S.ricini are still munching merrily away on the privet and the first few hatchlings of the Eri eggs have started appearing - if all the eggs hatch I hope the piviet will be able to cope! I hope there will be some caterpillars to show at FibreFest, particularly if the silk spinning course gets any takers....

Back to the combs - no wonder woolcombers were usually big strong men, my shoulders are aching and I've only done a few grams!