I have surpassed my personal best this time with a four month absence from the blog. This not because life has been boring - far from it!

I have taken a workshop with the wonderful Jette Vandermaiden in tied weaves at Devon Weavers Workshop, delivered successful indigo workshops for Oxford Guild WSD, and for South Hams Spinners, taken a 3 end block weave course with Jason Collingwood in Cornwall, done 9 days of Drawn to the Valley Open Studios at lovely, lovely Leewood, (www.leewood.co.uk) and been helping with the organization for the  textile programme for next year. I've written articles for future editions of The Journal (http://www.thejournalforwsd.org.uk) and Workbox Magazine and watched the rain and cold put paid to the birth of the Leewood Dye garden - for this year, anyway.

There is a small Wensleydale flock enjoying the 30 acres and I am enjoying the fleece! It is beautiful - long, lustrous and curly and dyes beautifully. It justifies its existence simply by being gorgeous to look at, as far as I am concerned.

My latest involvement has taken me right out of my comfort zone. I am one of a group of craftspeople who have been working with Royal Opera House choreographer, Freddie Opoku-Addaie as he creates a piece for the Compass Project. Bespoke will tour Devon in October/November 2012 and will unite the art of dance with sculpture, weaving, environmental art and silk spinning. The initial workshop was a unique and profoundly challenging experience. The result will be, in my case, an interpretation and fusion of the movements of a handspinner with those of a dancer - it will be a relief to those of you who know me in the flesh to hear that I will be spinning during the performance, not dancing!

This has not been a good summer for my silkworms - I hatched some of last year's moths and enjoyed their short lifespan, and have observed mating. The eggs went in the fridge for next year as the weather has been dreadful, cooler than normal, less sunlight than normal and the impact of foodplants unpredictable. I decided not to try and hatch caterpillars I might not be able to feed, so nstead of lots and lots of different species, I have raised one batch of Japanese Oak cats, and have saved the cocoons for next year, along with last year's Giant Atlas, whose eggs are now in the fridge.

Now to finish my Jason Colllingwood warp.....

Silkworms, bananas and excitement!

It seems that though my intention is always to update the blog at least once a week, that my default setting is once a month!

Since my last post I have taught a workshop and rashly decided to put my faith in the Garcia vats - not taking with me a failsafe traditional Spectralite vat (when people are paying, they want a successful indigo vat!) and I am delighted to report that both the henna vat and the fructose vat worked splendidly. This success was repeated yesterday at Peter Tavy Guild of WS&D when I made a vat with a banana (it was a small vat!) and got some gorgeous blues. I will be working out how to lower the pH slightly to make the vat more appropriate for wool, so watch this space.

The silkworm season is upon us again and my first batch of Japanese Oak Silkmoth caterpillars are hatching. The first emerged on May 1st, appropriately enough and today the first few have changed from yellow skins to the green that they will keep until they cocoon. There are lots of pix of these on the blog already so I don't feel that you need to see more of the same!

The excitement part comes from two aspects - one is the fact that Nick Viney's new studio space is underway at http://www.leewood.co.uk/ and we will be starting to run courses there in the not to distant future. We have started a dye garden - it's a bit bare at the moment and though it is fairly goat-proof (a relative position, as anyone who has kept goats will know) we are wondering how the rabbits will take to the prospect of new diet possiblities. We shall see.....

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.