Blog
I've read a bit about silkworms... and silk. It is a subject that could engross one for a lifetime I believe. Heather Winslow's pre-conference class at Midwest Weaver's Conference this year was about silk and one of her students raises silkworms. And she brought some to class! My classroom was just down the hall so I made a pest of myself and went to look.
Mistakes in dyeing can be messy... but sometimes there is a happy outcome even when you think it is all going to crap partway through.
I made a measuring error while dyeing a violet/blue yarn and as the dye was already in a jar with water in it, I couldn't easily save it. I wanted to use this large volume of dye so it seemed the right moment to try some overdyeing.
A friend recently gave me quite a lot of churro yarn that was dyed by someone else. The colors weren't quite what she wanted and she asked if I could use it. And not being able to say no to free high-quality yarn even when the colors were a little bold, it came to live in my studio.
On social media I often use this hashtag, #notafraidtodye
I've been waking up in the night the last few days with a lot of pain in my back. This is unusual for me and in my middle-of-the-night confusion I couldn't figure out how I could suddenly feel so old and creaky. In the morning I remembered. I've been dyeing yarn for almost two weeks now and that is enough to make anyone's back ache.
Maybe this visual will help.
Oh my.
It has been quite a day in the dye studio thus far. There was the leveling problem with the lightest gray and the attempt to fix it went horribly wrong...
Let me back up. I've been working on a large dye project. I'm dyeing yarn for a big tapestry a friend is weaving and while I'm at it, I'm dyeing the yarns I need for my upcoming workshops. The first pot I wanted to get going this morning needed special care. It was a pot of the lightest gray I dye, DOS 0.03. This yarn frequently comes out quite spotty, so I used some of my tricks to try to get it level. Unfortunately, I didn't use all of them because it was clear before the pot even started to heat that this yarn was not going to be remotely all one color. Severely blotchy darker grays with spots of almost white yarn. This will never do. Perhaps the students won't care, but every time I see that ball of yarn on the yarn table, I'm going to cringe and kick myself for not using Abegal Set and for putting the acid in before the yarn had a chance to sit in the levelers for awhile.
I really enjoy playing with color. And what better way to experiment with color than making your own yarn for tapestry? Interweave's spinning magazine, Spin Off, has an article in the current issue (Spring 2017) about spinning for tapestry weaving by yours truly.
The dyeing, spinning, weaving, and writing of this article was an adventure. The real story is that my original intent was to spin various colors of fleece and weave them while hiking for two weeks on the Colorado Trail last summer. I quickly remembered how much I like hiking for 12+ hours at a stretch and how little time that leaves me for sitting still and spinning or weaving. I only finished one tiny tapestry on that hike and it was not the thing for this article.
The United States is out of cotton seine twine. You can't blame it entirely on me. Other tapestry teachers recommend the same warp I do. That is my story and I'm sticking to it.
If you've tried to order cotton seine twine warp for tapestry weaving sometime in the last three months almost anywhere in the US, you may have been disappointed. Yes, my online classes are partially to blame, so I'm here to update you on the shortage.
You can hold off on the stash intervention. I found my knitting. I can't believe I hadn't knitted anything for a month and a half and what's more, hadn't even thought of looking for the project in that time.
But I did find it tucked into the back of one of the living room bookcases on top of the maps. Just hiding innocently in the back dark corner. I think I need a nice big knitting basket that lives permanently next to my "spot" on the couch.
....
And the last thing I learned today? If you sit at the loom and weave for 6 hours, you get a lot woven. I am so thrilled at my progress today and hope to repeat it over Labor Day weekend three times. I might even get the first two panels off the loom if I do that. I was spurred to this feat by a course I had to watch and the fact that the rest of my computer workload was put-off-able for the time being.
