Sunday 24 January 2010

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.

9 comments:

  1. Oh Helen that yarn is glorious! Yum! Just my favorite colors and beautiful texture. I'm definitely envious!

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  2. Wow, this is beautiful. I love the colours.

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  3. GORGEOUS! yes, absolutely gorgeous!! I can see why you love your yary

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  4. ...should be spelled, yarn :>]]

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  5. Ooh thank you one and all for enthusiastic response

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  6. never mind about the painting - your yarn looks beautiful! I should really do more of this kind of "free" work - I tend to get bogged down by spinning a lot for projects....

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  7. helen fantastic work! I'll be in Wales at the beginning of July, for work, if at all possible, maybe I could drop in, just to say a hello in the real world?

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  8. your yarn is fantastic!

    love
    yvette

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