Madder

 Have a look at these wonderful pictures of madder dyeing

A small Success with the Mohair Art Yarn

I rang up my friend Anne who has been mentioned on this blog more than once.  and had a bit of a whinge.  "I can't seem to get on top of these new yarns I  want to spin" I said full of  misery and moans -talk about the January blues.  "I think" said Anne,  expert spinner and generally a wonderful crafts woman "that you need to concentrate on  one and practice till you get it right" So I went round to visit  and practised and came home and did a bit more and here is  a lovely white mohair yarn on a fabulous mohair and  silk core yarn. yum It reminds me of snow and ice
Now the challenge is  how to describe it to  Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers for whom I  running a workshop in the rear future

And
snowdrops
are just starting  to appear

and now I am feeling a bit better

A very little blog about Yarn maker

Yarn maker arrived about a week ago, but it was  a few days before I sat down with it,  with a cup of fabulous fragrant  fresh fair trade coffee - anything better than a cup of good coffee on a grey January day  is hard to find  and with the wood burner burning, near perfect -and read it cover to cover. Articles that I particularly enjoyed were Leslie Prior on Cashmere, Leslie  has the  only breeding flock in the UK and is very knowledgeable not only about the fibre but also about world trading conditions.   Amanda Hannaford  explains how to blend cashmere with lots of other fibres  and spin it.  There was a most fascinating article about the White Faced Woodland, which despite being a hill sheep  has a fine fleece.  It is  a new one to me so ........ memo to self get a fleece. This is the third edition of this new publication printed on recycled paper and celebrating the spinner's craft  but I think the best yet.  What else can I say?   Get yourself a copy.
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Spun Mohair

This is the  first spinning of the carded mohair  I dyed in my previous post.  I carded it with a little-just  a little glitter, used a glitter thread as a core thread and then plied it with yet more of the sequined yarn.
mmm!
Am I happy?
It is okay but not quite the cloudsof mohair I wanted.
I shall  have to try again

To Scour or not Scour that is the question.Or is it?

.Maiwa's  blog describes how  you need to scour -ensure that fabric is free of all natural oils and grease before dyeing-the conventional view. Cotton needs  a prolonged boil with washing up liquid and washing soda, silk just a gentle wash in washing up liquid  to remove dressing and wool a scour with washing up liquid either cold or hot depending on your preference. .India Flint on her blog as she often does takes an original and thought provoking point on the issue of scouring
India points out that  Japanese mordant methods which features many dips with drying in between before starching  and says ...".and if it's so strongly attached to the cloth that you have to boil it off with dangerously strong chemical assistants then you might as well leave it there......"
hmm
but then it is  not starch added after mordanting  being removed by boiling cotton in washing soda and washing up liquid it is the natural oils in the cotton being removed so you can mordant.
Do we need to remove the oils  from cotton? The sericin from silk and the lanolin form wool?
.Anything which has been washed  a lot is going to be okay for dyeing and DOH! stupid of  me - the point that India has made that washing powder  often contains sodium carbonate which will act as a mordant had not occurred to me.  So  well washed cottons linens and silks  may not need scouring or indeed  mordanting. You can check for the first with cotton by dropping a drop of water onto a dry cotton. If the water beads the cotton contains natural oils and so the water does  not penetrate.  If it goes flat and soaks in the cotton contains no oils.
My thoughts are like this:
If water cannot penetrate new cotton then nor will the mordants or dyes .
Many years ago when  I first  I tried dyeing cotton with natural dyes I was very disappointed at the pale patchy colour.  Then I discovered  JN Liles The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing. It was a light bulb moment for me and  an "aha! That's what I am  doing wrong" .   He emphasised the importance of preparation and tells you how to prepare all natural fibres. by scouring.
When I read the two blogs more carefully I realise what I had thought was a debate about scouring was two people talking (mostly) about two different things.  Maiwa about ridding new fibres and fabrics of oils etc and India Flint mostly talking about using recycled fabrics and washing silk (which had previously been dry cleaned)  However  her point that  her steaming of bundled fabrics  really pushes the dye into the fibre is something really worth worth thinking about  and trying.  All the fabric bundling I do is is setting  the dye over a long period with solar heat.

As I  said
Interesting
Provided you are  natural dyer :)
Incidentally I go into scouring  in all my dye books  Currently on offer with 20% off on my website  (Till the end of January) but  both blogs are worth reading for  more on the subject. And India Flint's Eco Colour is one of  the great classics of the natural dyeing world.


Muslin and silks on the line.  

The sentence of death for weld

These fabulous-well to a natural dyer they are fabulous- lovely weld plants are under sentence of death- the reason?  They are growing in Enys's green house.  She tells me she tried to germinate some weld seed a couple of years ago, they failed, she cast them on the greenhouse floor and her DH dug the ground for his tomatoes and .....Weld! Enys says she will try and transplant them but they have very very very long roots.

For some time now she has been nurturing madder in pots.  Amazing to think  these rather uninspiring looking  plants can produce of the greatest of dyes.  These plants are two years old and so only really need another year or possibly two. before they can be used .    Enys is going to give them a haircut this is,  she tells me,  to encourage growth. 
The other plant is Coreopsis sp one of my favourites as it makes  a lovely vibrant orange with ammonia.  
If you have clicked on the links to see the colour you can get  get from these you can see why I am really keen on them all.  I hope the weld plants survive being transplanted  I had very little weld last year and I really missed it. 

 

Oh! and Happy New year to all my readers  followers and friends .

May you be fulfilled 

and happy

Creating colour to combat the Christmas blues and two reviews of books.

At last time to write a blog.  Well that is not strictly true what I really mean time to do something and write a blog about it. Somehow Christmas and a frozen world had blocked all my creativity

This is what the dye garden looked like after heavy snow and -10degees C .  Most of  the UK and now half of he US look like this not to mention many European countries but I like to have  a memory of what is a very unusual event for us.

I waved off the family yesterday and immediately fell down into the dumps, the post Christmas blues hit me right between the eyes.  This required emergency action so after a token stripping the  beds and dumping sheets into washing machine I began to think.   Although we have had a thaw here my studio still has all the water turned off as I have one burst pipe and all the dye pots and also my mordant pots are all frozen up.  However I did  manage to pull out some mordanted carded mohair.  Aha! This has a history, Years and years ago our local bargain store that sold bin ends had some of this . As spinners we were very snooty about it as it spun  nothing like spinning mohair from fabulous high quality mohair fleece. .  However it is just the thing for Pluckyfluffs clouds of mohair yarn. page 139 of Intertwined by Lexi Boeger aka Pluckyfluff ISBN 13-978-1-159253-374-9  Here carding fabulous mohair results in too heavy a result so rather than light clouds I had lumps. Now I didn't have this mohair but a friend of a friend had bought masses and being a hoarder there it was in a huge sack in her loft which she now wanted to clear out so this is what I dyed in preparation for a lovely exciting spinning session. January is such an  ideal month for sitting warm and cosy and spinning.

So quietly while DH was out with the dog and no one could see  I crept into the kitchen and dyed carefully on the kitchen table. ( I feel guilty only because I have a studio, an office and mostly a summer house for my own use not to mention two spinning wheels, a drum carder and related baskets in the sitting too)  but actually DH only laughed at my sneaked in  little dyeing corner)
I mixed up lac, cochineal, logwood, logwood and fustic and Jazz (an Earthues dye that gives a reddy purple) If you are going to do this don't forget to wear a mask and gloves and never use for dyeing something you might later want for cooking

I put some cling film onto an old baking tray more  to contain the dye than for any other reason

I poured some of the dye in and then covered it with cling film and pressed the dyes into the rest of the mohair.

Then I added a silk cap to mop up the excess dye.  Although my mordanted pot was full of them I could only free two and even these had to be defrosted in my studio microwave

Then I microwaved the lot for 5 minutes ( in my studio microwave )

You know it is ready when the cling film is crinkled and sucked in slightly. Ideally leave the dyes overnight  to set at this point -which is what I always tell my students but what the hell! Laws are made to be broken and I wanted a result.  So I rinsed and spun in the washing machine and put the stuff to dry by the wood burner.  By this time even outside the camera  flashed  when photographing it so the colour are not quite as dark as they  in real life but although the cochineal gave me a little too much pink I was pleased with the resulting colour.
Tonight I  hope to sit and spin .  In Pluckyfluffs instructions she says to card  mohair interspersing it with some sparkly stuff and colour and then to ply with sparkly yarn.  Hmm!  I am not to keen on sparkle bur a yarn I had plied with some sparkly stuff went in a flash at Trefriw Christmas market so maybe I need to be a bit more relaxed about it.  Besides I have  some bought at a stall when I did Lexi's workshop on Bristol in March

I am  still reading Respect the Spindle. This not a new book but one I came across recently so new to me.   I found this a most inspiring book and it really got be going on spindle spinning again so much so I sat on the sofa for two nights spinning watching television and spinning by rolling down my thigh. This meant I was sitting slightly twisted and  the following morning I could hardly move and then I developed sciatica . Two months on it is still giving me a bit of a problem .   This is hardly an advert for the book but in fact it is the best spindle book I have ever read and I loved it .  Especially the story of how Abby learnt spinning a child in the Andes and of leaning over the Inca ruins to spindle and see who amongst her friends who could spin the longest yarn without breaking.  It was usually her she says who had to hurtle down the mountains side to get her spindle.  The book is full of photos of  spindles with beautifully spun cops of wool and she tells you how to do all sort so different spindling as well as having projects in the back.  Now I have a thorough dislike (normally ) of books which are full of projects but these are in fact quite gorgeous  and I have started to spin (cautiously) for the neck warmer .

The second book I  have had on my shelves for a while and used the freedom of having time for a concentrated read to get into it although I  found it hard going.

 The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy ISBN-13 978-0-9432-6421-1
This is a book about Brian Murphy's  love affair with Persian carpets
I nearly threw it in the bin following a snooty  comment about western natural dyers being  hobbyists on the level of someone milk churning at a country fair and I struggled too as he writes rather too much about politics and history of Iran and Afghanistan . Slowly however I began to see how he was trying to set Persian carpets into context but he also went off on a mild spiritual journey inspired by a mediaeval poet  and Sufism  so he could find a carpet that had meaning for him.  He describes the best carpets as a form of poetry.   However and infuriatingly he  had very few photos of the carpets he talked about even the ones he bought.  Verdict on the book?  Interesting  yes,  would I recommend it to a friend -hmm- not really it seemed to fall between a lot of stools for  me.  It told me nothing new about natural dyes, not enough about carpets and too much about politics and  history.