Art Work to Yarn

I am only doing routine sort of dyeing at the moment , getting purples and greens for some up and coming workshops in February but nothing of note. However I suddenly yearned to create colour so while renewing bonds with a textile group Chameleons I indulged in translating a photo by Linda Jones- a member of the group- into a painting. Linda takes fabulous photos. A textile artist herself she has an eye for pictures that will translate into textiles. This one that I used is a photo of water moving into a mossy water weedy surface so is full of whites dark greens.turquoise wit the odd flash of pale terracotta. unfortunately my photo of her photo not very good nor for that matter of fact is that of my painting which is a shame as neither show clearly the colour or texture. I had fun painting with my natural dye inks and then putting pastel over the surface although I had no particular plan in mind which is the way I like to work however the following evening , on my own and deciding to watch a film I decided to card some fibres for spinning.. Three or four trips ( because I kept going back for more colour or more texture) to the studio resulted in dark green, blues, purple merino, white and dyed silks: laps, throwsters waste and textured wools. I used a wide coarse carder, and put the fibres though once and spent an happy evening making three large rolags. Each one represented an area of the picture.
The following day I started to spin a singles yarn on the top whorl of the jumbo flyer of my Lendrum pulling strips off the rolag and spinning from top to bottom of my picture.
I gave the hank a very hot soapy wash at the end and was pleased that there was little colour loss and gave the fibres a tug to straighten the fibres out.
I really enjoyed the whole process and I love my yarn.

Waterfall 3 framed

I got the picture back from the framers done in double quick time-just 6 days. Tim and Chanel of of the Cathedral Framers St Asaph Denbighshire ( in case you want some work done-strongly recommended by me) normally like 3 weeks so I was really grateful. It is hard even to believe that we were in such desperate straits, snowbound and with freezing weather as now we have had a thaw and there is only a little snow on the hills and we are back to a green world again.
I am really really pleased with it.
Just to compare here is Waterfall 2 done in 2007, Waterfall 1 my first piece done in 1997 I have no good photos of unfortunately

Indigo:natural versus synthetic

Leena has just pointed me to a site that aims to explain the difference between synthetic and natural indigotin( commonly called indigo). This is an translation of a Japanese paper and in summary say that while the synthetically derived Ai ( Japanese Indigo) is chemically the same as natural ai the bonds between the natural are shorter. Someone adding acomment says that the natural ai aggregates. This has an impact on the way it behaves while bonding to textiles and means that natural ai bonds better , is less likely to be washed off and less likely I think to crock. Interesting piece of research!

DYe Garden in snow and waterfall 3

Heavy snow today, a most unusual event in this part of the world and my most recent picture Waterfall 3