Tag Archives: dyeing

A weekend in the country

pan2It’s summer here in Canada. Time to start heading to the cottage on the weekends and summer vacations and time for a little guide on fibre fun you can bring along.

General thoughts
Keep your projects small and light. Bring several! Have things you can do while traveling and ones for when you are at your destination. Variety is good! Pack things in sealable containers or ziplock bags to keep them from the elements, especially if you are camping.

Knitting
Small and simple knitting projects are great to bring along, like socks, hats, scarves and mittens. Travel time is a great time to work on your projects.

Spinning
Spindles are great for traveling with. Supported spindles, like a Russian spindle (or here) or a Takhli, can be used in the car during traveling.

If you are staying at a cottage or someplace indoors then a folding spinning wheel is also an option. Most should fit in the trunk or back seat.

Fibre prep is something you can also do. Hand cards and a dog brush are pretty portable. You can go through a bunch of fleece in no time on a relaxing evening.

Dyeing
Dyeing can be a fun activity for the whole family. Before going you can do research with the kids to find out what plants are available where you are going and figure out which ones you want to try. Once there you can get them to help gather and prepare the materials and help out with the dyeing.

My partner and I sometimes do natural dyeing when we are up at the cottage. We bring the dyepots, mordant, stir sticks and fibre/yarn with us. I would suggest using only Alum and cream of tarter, as these have the least impact on the environment. Also, make sure to only use as much mordant as needed for the amount of fibre you are working with. This will reduce the amount of left over mordant that will be disposed of.
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We use either lake water or spring water from up the road. We use the propane stove in the kitchen, but you could also use a campfire to do the dyeing. You have to watch closely with a campfire to make sure the dyepot doesn’t boil.

We usually collect our dye materials from the area. A good rule of thumb is to never collect more than 10% of a plant in any given area. For example, if using leaves, only take leaves from 1 or 2 branches of a tree and spread out your collection over a large area.

Used plant material can be used for compost or spread out in the bush to decompose. Left over mordant baths can be disposed of onto sandy areas, like a dirt road away from the house and septic system. Do not pour it down the drain into the septic system! Left over dyebath can usually be disposed of this way as well. Make sure to dilute both baths with a lot of water before getting rid of them.

Weaving
There are several very portable options for weaving and traveling

Weavettes and small weaving frames
These are very portable hand help frames. The small ones are great for working on while traveling! You can whip off a square in 15 – 30 minutes.

Backstrap looms and ground looms
These can be setup before you leave and used once you get to your destination.

Weighted warp loom
This is a very simple version of a weighted warp loom. All the material can be kept in a medium sized container.

Colour my world

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I love working with colour in my designs and in my projects. I’m such a magpie for beautifully hand dyed yarns and fibres.

Using colours and choosing colours is a skill that I have built up over the years. It has taken me a long time to learn what works and how to “see” what a colour is.

I’m more confident now in my colour sense then I was even just five years ago. I’ve done a fair bit of dyeing and colour sampling in that period and I’m finally at a stage where I can look at an object and start figuring out what components the colour is made of.

These days, I love just playing with colour, seeing what I can come up with, rather than getting stressed out and all technical about it.

Back in the late 90’s, early 00’s I did photography as a hobby. I worked mostly in black and white, as I understood that more. I did print  in colour, but it was more difficult and more expensive.

One tool from colour photo printing that can help dyers is a Color Print Viewing Filter Kit. These are cards with gels in cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green and blue, with three different densities of colour on each card. You use these filters by holding them in front of you eyes and viewing the object you are working on. You can then compare what you are seeing to the colour you want to replicate. I found these very useful when I was printing colour photographs because I didn’t yet have enough of a colour sense to be able to figure out what I needed to do to get to the colour I wanted.

I work with both chemical dyes and natural dyes. I like natural dyes more. They give more complex colours and they often impart distinct aromas to the yarn. I also enjoy being able to go out and gather many plant materials to do my own dyeing.

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These are some samples of things I have dyed over the years.

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Silk hankies dyed in weak acid dyes. I dyed these last year for classes I was teaching on spindle spinning silk. These were dyed in mason jars filled with dye and steamed in a large canning jar for 45 minutes.

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These were dyed as part of a natural dyeing class taught by Harriet Boon. The three primaries were Cochineal (red), Osage orange (yellow) and Saxon blue (blue), which is derived from indigo.

The secondary colours were made by dyeing in one colour and then over dyeing in a second colour. The secondary colours are arranged so that the colour they were overdyed with is the one they are closer to. For example – in the greens, the one closest to the blue was first dyed in Osage orange then in the Saxon blue, the one closest to the yellow was first dyed in Saxon blue then in Osage orange. We did it this way so we could see the difference that the order of dyeing would have on the final colour.

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These are socks made from a batch of yarns that my partner and I dyed up at the cabin on Lake Fletcher. The yarn was pre-mordanted in tin. The light colour is from Black Locust seed pods and the dark colour is from Mountain Ash leaves with a copper mordant added to the dye pot. The skein was treated with an ammonia after bath.

The skein was dyed by putting a little over half the skein in the first dye pot and then doing the same on the other end in the other dye pot. There is an overlap of about two inches that has both colours.

Video blog day – Welcome to the Display Room!

Today I’m taking you through a tour of the Display Room from the Ontario Handspinning Seminar 2013 that happened June 14 – 16, 2013.

You can continue the tour by going to the following videos:
Baggie Challenge table
Skeins for next year
Special Projects Competition
Skeins Competition pt.1
Skeins Competition pt.2
Just for Fun! tables
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I worked on the display committee this year with one other woman. There is minimal work over the months before the seminar. Most of the work is done at the seminar.

Before the seminar we take care of finding judges for the competitions and planning the layout of the display room. We make sure all the materials needed for displays were passed along to us, gather additional display materials as needed and print updated signs for the current years displays. We also update various forms for the competitions, judges, Just for Fun and Fashion Show items.

During the weekend we are responsible for taking in items for display and competition, setting up the room and displays, helping the competition judges, watching over the displays during public times, helping during the fashion show, getting the items back to the owners and clearing up the display area. Thankfully we have great volunteers helping the two of us with all of this!

We were also responsible for creating the awards certificates, gathering up all the prizes, taking pictures of the winning items, updating the slide presentation for the awards ceremony and handing out the certificates and prizes at the ceremony.

I had an awesome time being on this committee! You do work long hours at the seminar, but it’s so worth it to be able to see all the amazing work that comes it. Plus we are the lucky ones who get to handle all the items and get a good look at them.

Spinning certificate program

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My final projects from years one through five

I’m heading into the sixth and final year of my spinning certificate program. You can see an outline of the years here.

It’s been a pretty amazing journey.

My class started when I was 40. At the time I figured I could do the program then, rather than waiting till I was 46 or 52 to do it. It was also the right time as I wanted to take my spinning more seriously and I thought this program would give me a structured way of learning all this stuff, rather then me trying to find classes all over the place to learn things.

The teachers for our classes are amazing people. Their knowledge and generosity are humbling. And lets face it – the thought of having to grade homework for 25 to 40 students is pretty intimidating, yet they do that, year after year.

Some highlights for me:
All of the dyeing classes. We’ve done both acid dyeing and natural dyeing. These have been a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot in them.

Spinning woolen. This was probably the hardest challenge for me when we started. I’d mostly spun worsted or semi worsted. Learning to spin light and lofty was challenging. I still don’t spin enough of this and have to retry it each year otherwise I forget how to do it.

Bast fibres. Flax, hemp and cotton. I had tried these before, but it was pretty dismal. Last years class finally made things click and I was able to spin them. I think these fibres have moved up from the “Ugh! Argh!” list to “Ok, that’s not so bad”. I think with more practice I could actually spin enough cotton for a decent sized project – like a shirt or light sweater.

Silk has become one of my top five favourite fibres to spin. The diversity of silks that we have available to spin now is pretty amazing. I also love dyeing silk.

The other other students in the class. We have a very diverse group filled with really amazing people. For the first three years there were a lot of us in the college cabins, which bonded us all to each other. It’s great being able to share with these people, and to know there is a group out there that supports you through getting the home work done and supporting you in your life. I’ve met good friends through this class.

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I thought I would finish off by showing you what part of an assignment from class looks like.

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This is from my year five final project. The criteria we had was to make a project using a bast fibre, with at least 150 meters of yarn. After that the choices were up to the student.

I chose to make a crocheted bath scrubby out of hemp. After doing sampling I found that I liked a 3-ply yarn that was the size of #10 crochet cotton. The gold coloured hemp was fairly easy to spin – it was a well prepared fibre. The purple was not a nice experience. There were sections with very short cotton like fibres, and other sections where the fibre may not have been retted very well and were clumped together and hard to draft. The final purple yarn was thicker than I was aiming for, but it worked out fine in the final product. I pretty proud of the final product, thought it certainly isn’t economical. The final project took a total of 71 hours. That includes all the sampling, spinning and making the final project, and doing the documentation and mounting.

You have to document your thought process on the project – what you wanted to make, why you chose which fibres, fibre prep and spinning techniques you did, what worked, what didn’t, and your comments on it. You are also to show and document any sampling you did to get to the final yarn you used.

Part of the final project is to show a mounted skein of the final yarn, plus the final object.

For the mounted skeins, you need the following:

  • fibre samples (raw, washed and processed if you do all that work)
  • a 10 yard sample skein, tied in four places with white cotton
  • a 1 inch card of wrapped singles
  • a 1 inch card of wrapped plyed yarn (if final yarn is plyed)
  • finished samples / articles
  • documentation on the yarn, stating it’s purpose, describing the fibre and how you processed and spun it, your finishing techniques, description of sampling or finished item, and final comments / observations on your yarn, spinning, sampling and anything else you may have learned or want to change.
  • for the documentation you need to keep track of how much fibre was used, how much waste was generated, the wraps per inch (WPI) of the singles and plyed yarn, the twist angle (TA), twists per inch (TPI) and yards per pound (YPP) of the plyed yarn.

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