It's been a busy few months, with a talk on silkworms for the London Guild, a Natural Dye Workshop for Tawe Guild and a week teaching Designer Spinning at the Association Summer School, held this year in Carmarthen.

 My students and I spent a wonderful week designing yarns from inspirational pictures that each one had brought with them and we also managed two group projects. Students chose either to select fibres that related to a blue picture, or fibres that related to an orange picture, made a giant batt of the fibre selections then divided the batt between them and spun the yarns.


The Blue Yarns



The Orange Yarns









In addition, the students all produced wonderful work from their own inspirational material and we explored many spinning techniques to produce the huge range of yarns produced. Among the techniques we tried were:
hand carding and long woollen draw refresher; core yarns; coil yarns; cable yarns; wraps; boucle; entrapment yarns using fibres and fabric; bead yarns; snarl yarns; blended  batts; Navajo ply; all sorts of insertions, including washers and press studs.......


I am extremely proud of Ineke, Jane W, Joanna, Carolyn, Sue, Jane S, Helen, Carol, Christine and Hilary and I hope they are proud of themselves!

Below are images of their work:

 

 

 

 

A Busy Week...

Last Friday I had the pleasure of teaching two workshops at the Contemporary Craft Fair at Bovey Tracey. They are only two hours so one can't expect to achieve a lot but what a wonderful set of students!

The first was 3D weaving - those amongst you who are weavers will understand that this is a concept that has limitless potential but I confined myself to two options.

The first was to use a cardboard tube (the inside of a tube of wrapping paper for straight sided pots and cardboard cones from weaving yarns for pots with narrower bottoms than tops) used to support the warp whilst the tapestry technique was employed to produce a weft faced fabric.

The second option was to use willow prunings to create areas of fabric in the spaces between the branches.

Willow branch in progress

Finished branch

Pot in progress



Finished pot, though the ends still need to be clipped



The afternoon session was the perennial favourite, indigo dyeing

We made a vat, stronger than I would normally make but in two hours there isn't much opportunity to hang around!

We clamped, stitched and tortured cloth in various ways, wetted the pieces out, then dipped them in the indigo. Then came that 'Ahh..' moment when the cloth started to turn blue, the stitching was removed and the white patterns on blue revealed.

Cloth emerging from vat and just beginning to turn blue as the oxygen returns to it

The star of the show! Anna, the felting tutor, had this example of nuno felting with devore to show her class. It was a pale orangey/yellow and she bravely put it in the indigo. It is just glorious!

Some of our results



Anne Field

Like the rest of the spinning and weaving world, I am so sorry to hear of the death of Anne Field. She was an inspirational teacher, a wonderful craftswoman and a lovely person. I saw her last about 14 months ago in Christchurch when she took me on a tour of that devastated city, taking care to show me the positive things that were emerging from the chaos. She was cheerful and looking forward to her teaching trips overseas. Sadly, this wasn't to be and the cancer she had fought for so long returned with a vengence. I will miss her and treasure the memories of that last visit to Christchurch. The textile community has lost one our heroines

Happy New Year!

I realise of course that the end of the May is hardly an appropriate time to wish people a HNY, but it seems that for some reason I haven't posted here this year!

I have been busy with lots of things, including working at the wonderful Leewood, www.leewood.co.uk , teaching spinning, weaving and dyeing. The course dates are on the website under Textile Diary, but do check with me about the costs....

My first batch of silkworms are hatching, though they have slowed down now the weather has turned wintery again and I wonder how my dye garden at Leewood is faring. We are growing woad, weld, tansy, saw-wort, soapwort, Japanese indigo, madder, golden rod, achillea, dark red dahlias and more.
Pictures sooner rather than later, I hope!

On the weaving front, I am working my way through the samples that I started with Ann Richards last year and learning a lot, even that Ashenhurst doesn't necessarily have to make your brain hurt!
I have just designed a yarn for Yarnmaker but you'll have to wait for the issue to be published to find out about that.

Next on my list is the work I need to do for the course I am teaching at the Association of GWSD Summer School, in Wales in August.

Highlights since I last blogged have been the Spring Course in The Netherlands, at despinners.nl and the birth of a little black Wensleydale at Leewood - I bagged the fleece within minutes of her birth!

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.