Category Archives: Fibre preparation

October 7, 2014 · 12:02 pm

Week 6 Silkworm update

The silkworms are getting sooo big!

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A few of them have gone to silk already.

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Others are working on it.

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I took dozens to the guild where the white elephant table accepted them as their first ever consignment of ‘livestock’ and they went home with a spinner who has grandchildren staying (and a weeping mulberry tree).  Here they are in my basket ready to go…

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Meanwhile. the search for mulberry leaves continues. We went to the Himeji gardens yesterday but the mulberry trees were not fully in leaf.

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On the other hand, the gardens were beautiful even on an overcast day.

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And there were ducklings!

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In the end we made a trip to a nearby crash repairer where there is an immense mulberry tree hanging over a fence and dropping fruit… so I got some mulberries as well as plenty of leaves no one will miss.

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September 30, 2014 · 6:02 pm

Week 5 silkworm update with bees

It has been a big week for the silkworms.  The stage of audible munching has been reached.  I come out in the morning and there is just about no leaf left.  I now have 3 trays of silkworms.

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Minutes after I add more leaves, holes appear and heads poke through them.  keeping up the supply is a big job.

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Meanwhile, the critter action in our backyard ramped up to a swarm of bees, hanging from a metal arch with a rose bush on it.

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I found a friendly beekeeper who agreed to come and collect them.  I didn’t realise I would be a participant.  He took pity on me and lent me a cover for my head and face and upper body.  He was wearing shorts and a t shirt!  I shook the archway and he held up a box and caught the swarm as it dropped in.

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They seem to have settled in.  Here they are heading in and out in the morning sun.

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The beekeeper noticed a second swarm in next door’s tree.  We hoped they might be two parts of the same swarm, but apparently not.  That koala shaped blob silhouetted against the sky is a mass of bees to high to reach.  They might be with us for some time to come.

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Meanwhile in backyard news, the biggest carrot ever grown at our place.  I guess I still think of myself as someone who does not grow carrots, and forgot to check on them.

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And the leeks and rhubarb are in.  Rhubarb with ginger and vanilla and orange this week.  Mmmm.

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September 23, 2014 · 8:54 am

Week 4 Silkworm update

It’s well and truly spring,  Our native orchids are in bloom.

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So is E Torquata, the Coolgardie gum.  The bees are happy about the whole thing.

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I’ve been out demanding action on climate change, with people all over the world (and hundreds locally).

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Fledging birds are getting in strife all over the metropolitan area (and many more are flying without difficulty, I hope)!

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The nettle harvest is in, such as it is.  I have gathered the largest nettles from our backyard, my parents’ garden and the local verges.

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And the silkworms are growing.  The small ones are still very small, and there is still only one mulberry tree with enough leaves to pick in the neighbourhood.  I’m picking fruit as well as leaves.

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The silkworms are stripy in some cases and creamy in others, just like last year… and I still have no idea why.  We’ve done our 12km City to Bay run!!  And work has been overwhelming.  Hopefully, less so from this point forward–so there might be a bit more crafting and posting.

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September 15, 2014 · 4:47 pm

Week 3 Silkworm Update with bonus Quilt and Gusset updates

The munching goes on.  Stone fruit are in blossom and coming into leaf, the Manchurian pears in our suburb have been snowing white petals and growing leaves… and I live in hope that more mulberry trees will do likewise very soon!  The one I am depending on is fruiting already.  The worms are getting bigger.

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And, I am delighted to announce that confiding in you has moved me to actually do something with my quilt parts.  I have confirmed that I have 20 nicely trimmed panels.

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I chose one of my stash fabrics for some sashing.  It’s black, but you know how it is with mood lighting, like the stuff my sewing machine provides in an indoor setting.  I calculated.  I cut.  I stitched it to two sides of each block!

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Then, a friend came over with her gallabeya-in-progress.  This is a flowing long-sleeved dress for Egyptian dancing (and, no doubt, other purposes depending on the wearer).  It’s a relative of the caftan.  There was a small problem involving ‘a rhomboid gusset’.  I was afraid when I realised that this pattern piece needed to be reverse engineered and that it wasn’t only a matter of inserting the fiddly little rhomboid…. I had agreed to help on the basis that two minds are better than one on almost every day.  With some help from my stash of retro sewing manuals and the interweb, we sorted it out.  The somewhat random prize goes to this YouTube video by Niler Taylor (who clearly knows her sewing) and Gertie’s blog, which I’ve enjoyed before–just in case anyone out there is having a gusset problem of their own!

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September 8, 2014 · 4:41 pm

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Let me begin with some dignity, because it won’t last. Soon we’ll be back to silkworms and other silly stuff.  Anne Harris of Annie’s Workroom would like to invite you to her exhibition.  It’s in Brisbane, Queensland–I am sorry to report this means I won’t be able to see it.

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Expressions of Love: Lovingly Interrupted brings together established contemporary artist Kim Schoenberger’s collection of treasured memories assembled from the humble teabag. And introduces emerging artist Anne Harris’s work of naturally dyed, painted and stitched images exploring the emotions of love. Official Opening 14th September 3.30pm. Closes 28th September: Gallery 159, 159 Payne Road, The Gap, Brisbane.  There is a special bus to make it easy for sunshine coast people to attend. Please call  Anne 0433 162 847 for more information or visit her on the web.

And now… for the silkworm update of the week.  OMG, as they say in the classics, the silkworms are still hatching!  I have been struggling to figure out a cross-national item to give a sense of scale (US coins don’t work for me).  Here is my trial object.  Let me know how I’m doing!

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Here is a close up of silk worms in several stages of growth–with more hatching every single day two weeks after they started!  They were all laid as eggs within a couple of days of one another, I hasten to add. What more can I say? There is still just one mulberry tree with leaves on it in the neighbourhood.

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On the weekend, there was lemon preserving (the salty kind)… inspired in part by an anonymous donation of a bag of Meyer lemons left on our porch.  Three cheers for the grower and the tree!

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I had the urge to cast on, a lot.

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I also had the urge to dye and since it was warm and sunny, took advantage by mordanting fabric for future leaf prints.  I had the realisation some time ago that I had somehow managed not to find a section on mordanting cellulose fabrics, with quite specific instructions, in Eco-Colour.  I had always wished there was a section like that in there.  Happily India Flint has indeed put it in her gorgeous book and if only I had paid more attention… Anyway, since I can’t change the past, I have been waiting for sunny weather to dip and dry and dip and dry on a principle somewhat different to the one I have been experimenting with–and now the sunshine is here I got to it!  Good dyeing times are coming…

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September 1, 2014 · 4:43 pm

Silkworm update: Week 1

The silkworms are still hatching.  In considerable numbers. I don’t have it in me to make this an exciting photo essay, though!

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If your eyesight is keen, you will see some have already morphed into the next stage of their lives.  See the larger one that is grey with a cream coloured head instead of looking like a tiny black ant?  Its at about 7 or 8 o’clock in the image below.  Did I mention the tiny factor?

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In sad news of the week (which has been all about more and more silkworms otherwise), I have discovered that very few mulberry trees are in leaf locally.  One in my neighbourhood, to be exact, on this first day of spring.  The weeping mulberries are showing no signs of green.  The black mulberries in the park lands (which I made a special bike detour to visit in hope) are leafless.  So there is just one white mulberry supporting my growing brood so far.  Luckily, those micro-maws don’t consume a lot of leaf each day… yet!

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August 25, 2014 · 9:21 am

Early silkworm hatchlings: Week 1, day 2

Last year, the silkworms hatched in September.  This year, in August.  I am not sure if that has more to do with the micro climate in my front room or global warming.  I am sorry to report I believe global warming is more likely.  Last night I went out and picked young lettuce for them.  This morning, I’ve been out examining the neighbourhood mulberry trees.  In good news for my little tiny silkworms, they are in leaf.

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So, brace yourselves!  We are re-entering the silkworm rollercoaster for another season!

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June 23, 2014 · 11:27 am

Dyes of antiquity: Walnut hulls

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When these walnut hulls came home from the Guild hall with me, who knows how long they had been stored?  I can only give an educated guess to the time involved in separating them from the walnuts… or the year in which that might have happened.  In the meantime, insects had become involved… so I put them in water and put a lid on and left them to steep in mid to late May 2014.  As you may remember, I decided I should honour the effort involved in all that dye gathering and storage… and so over a month later, a dye vat emerged…

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The stinkiness of which was unholy.  It may become a legend in my Guild.  But not in a good way!  The dye that emerged was inky and impressive.  I rather wish I had saved some to try using it as ink, but in all honesty I didn’t have that thought on the day… my nostrils said ‘begone!’.  The dark brown skeins in the foreground are walnut.

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And here is my sample card.

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Interestingly, the walnut dyes, together with every dye I have tried on both hot and cold processed mordants so far, show cold processed alum as the most obviously effective mordant, with hot processed alum coming second.  The cold processed sample is noticeably darker than all other samples.  My eye cannot detect a difference between the hot and cold processed rhubarb leaf mordant samples.  In this case, I expected that since I used an overwhelming quantity of rhubarb leaf, achieving a dye effect and not just a mordanting… that these samples would be a stronger shade of brown.  I can’t detect a difference between the rhubarb leaf mordanted samples and the no mordant sample.  So far, I have to concur (sadly) with Pia at Colour Cottage in finding that rhubarb leaf is not terribly effective as a mordant, at least in the ways I have applied and used it.  I have enough mordanted yarn to continue experimenting for some time to come…

 

 

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June 14, 2014 · 3:16 pm

In preparation for a natural dyeing workshop

As I write, I’m preparing to run a workshop at my Guild.  I’m counting down and there are only a few days left.  Preparation has been going on for weeks now! I’ve skeined beautiful organic wool and mordanted some.

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I’ve washed fleece in two colours and two breeds, and mordanted some.  I’ve decided being able to mordant cold in alum is a real benefit to preparing unspun fibres.  Less opportunity for felting or simply mooshing the fibres.  Three cheers to Jenny Dean, who introduced me to the idea of cold mordanting with alum.

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I treated some merino roving to a cold alum bath too. Later I decided that past unlovely experiments with paj silk could go in the mordant bath with a view to being overdyed.  And added silk embroidery thread.

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I have been packing things into bags and writing lists. I’ve begged milk bottles from coffee carts and turned them into sample cards. Finally, on the weekend, I wandered the neighbourhood on my bike gleaning leaves, and finding some damaged pomegranates that might be used for dyeing–the rats that were scampering along the fence nearby had clearly been having a banquet!  It was overcast, but can you see these two E Cinereas forming an arch at the end of this street?  Cute as a button!

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Ironbarks were oozing kino, which is their main strategy for avoiding pest attack.  This one seemed to have gone a bit too far…

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Some ironbarks were in flower. Gloriously.

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In some streets there was a carpet of flowers on the ground where lorikeets and rosellas had been partying.

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Some of the neighbourhood E Cinereas have recovered from the most recent attack of the chainsaws a bit.

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I stopped off at my favourite E Scoparia on my way home.  It now has some leaves I can reach for the first time since a bough was lopped a couple of years ago.

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So, I came home fully laden.  I even found an E Cinerea branch that had been cut some time ago but must have fallen to the ground more recently. Needless to say, it came home with me.

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Hopefully, my preparations are nearing completion.  I had a dream the other night where my workshop went terribly wrong… for one thing, there were two workshops and I had not prepared for the first one at all… and the Guild hall, which is a bit of a rabbit warren, had several rooms that I had not previously seen!  Perhaps it is the idea of using cochineal for the first time acting on my overdeveloped sense of responsibility…

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April 20, 2014 · 10:04 am

Rhubarb leaf and alum mordants, hot and cold processes

Way back in December I was thinking about hot and cold mordanting processes.  I decided on an experiment inspired by a post by Leena at Riihivilla which led in turn to a blog called From Silk Road.  There, Jarek shows experiments with solar mordanting over 28 days, and one of the mordants he is using is Himalayan Rhubarb. Mine is the good old fashioned European eating kind… but perhaps the same principles could be applied?  Jenny Dean certainly describes cold mordanting with alum and I have tried that previously with success.    I was also curious about the findings of Pia at Colour Cottage.  She has undertaken some experiments with rhubarb leaf mordant here and here and found it made no difference to dye uptake or lightfastness.  So disappointing!

I started with 1100g rhubarb leaves (and stewed the rhubarb with orange juice to go with waffles… mmmm).  Way more rhubarb leaf than necessary for the job, I think.    I have no way to know if I am even using the same rhubarb as Pia… but I decided to err on the side of plenty of rhubarb leaf and not committing a huge quantity of yarn. I created two, 25g skeins of Bendigo Woolllen Mills alpaca rich ‘magnolia’, left over from some past workshop I ran.  One was subjected to the classic heat treatment in rhubarb leaf solution (45 minutes on a bare simmer), left overnight to cool down and rinsed out.

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The other went into a glass jar for a solar treatment, which was quite hot at times.  It went into the jar on 16 December and our first 40C day of the year was scheduled for the 18th. I created two more skeins and mordanted them in alum, one using the hot process and the other packed into a bucket with a lid in the sun.  Here is the solar mordant rhubarb jar (and some iron soaking in vinegar water on the left), in December.  They’re sitting on a concrete surface with a concrete wall behind them.  I’m trying for thermal mass in a sunny spot.

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Things being what they are (by which I mean I have been too busy to think much about this experiment), I took the yarn out on 13 April 2014. Here it is before removal.  There was a little layer of mould stuck to the lid, for those who are wondering.  In retrospect, this would have been a great application for Stuff Steep and Store.

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Here is the yarn after removal from the rhubarb leaf solution.  I’d call that a dye and not only a mordant!

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Here is my solar process alum-mordanted yarn after similar neglect for the same period of time.

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Finally: my full selection dry and ready for use: no mordant, alum applied with heat, alum applied through solar process, rhubarb leaf applied with heat, rhubarb leaf applied through a solar process.

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