Tag Archives: polwarth

January 23, 2015 · 12:45 pm

More workshop preparation: batts, batts and more batts!

I spent a lot of hours recently creating batts for my spinning workshop.  I had all kinds of bits and bobs, some gifted from Guildies, some fleece washed and (sometimes) dyed right here at home, some from here and there and all over the place.  Even recycled sari silk.

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Batts based on natural undyed polwarth; batts based on indigo-dyed polwarth; batts based on eucalyptus-dyed corriedale…

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And then some based on merino and crossbred roving from the Guild trading table in all manner of wild colours.  The pile kept growing….

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Textured spinning is the goal, so in went silk noil, silk roving, silk yarn scraps, viscose, sparkly bits, alpaca locks, mohair, you name it!  Phew.  There’s a lot to do to get ready 🙂

 

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January 3, 2015 · 10:40 am

Some endings

Before the end of the year, we had a trip to Melbourne and I finally finished some socks I’ve been carrying around for quite a while. the triumphant moment when I grafted them occurred in a wonderful tea house our niece took us to.  She humours me as much as her aunt, so I recorded the moment for posterity (that would really mean, your viewing pleasure).

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I should admit that I don’t drink tea, so was very surprised to find myself relishing an iced peppermint and liquorice tea.  It was a lovely afternoon.  I have also finished the last of 2014’s (or was it 2013’s?) indigo dyed wool.  The last was polwarth.  I seem to recall I ran out of patience, which is always bad when you are handling wet wool, worse with fine wool, and possible only made still worse if also dealing with indigo.  Let me further confess, some felting resulted, which will not surprise other spinners.  This was the last of it, and I decided to just card it up and spin it lumps and all.  I have been drawing batts through a diz to make a roving.

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Rolled up roving:

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Spinning in progress, including lumps as promised! I feel sure there are more felted slippers in my future…

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So, here they are.  The last 3 skeins… all different shades, some first dyed with coreopsis or osage orange, and some involving quite a bit better spinning and plying than others!

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December 28, 2014 · 4:21 pm

Bark dyes

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What with all the bark collecting there’s been… there have been some bark dye pots too.

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I  smash the bark up small, the better to create a nice, strong dye.

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After heating, I get something more like this…

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For some reason the light out the back is making things look less spectacular rather than more spectacular (as is my camera’s usual tendency) as we head into summer–but as you can see I have scaled up to colour separation… grading the colours and carding them separately.  One of my friends put me onto this strategy and I just love it.  She’s very clever about colour and I feel lucky to have the benefit of her wisdom.

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And then carding…

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And more carding… and finally spinning, which is underway.  I hope your holiday season has treated you well and the new year is looking promising.  I think this kind of preparation, time consuming and sometimes boring as it is, always makes me think that promising things are in the future, and this is a year in which the collective project at our place involves focusing on optimism.   I will gratefully accept tips!

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October 12, 2014 · 4:47 pm

Ply time!

A while back I had used almost every bobbin I own, each with a different colour of thread on it.

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Over time there were even more bobbins of singles than this pictures shows…  finally there has been a season of plying, skeining and washing, and now I have this pile instead.

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Logwood purples, purple-greys and purple-browns, a cochineal pink (and a cochineal-logwood exhaust), three indigo blues, two madder exhaust-oranges, and a coreopsis exhaust yellow.  I didn’t take good enough notes of the fibres–some are on merino roving (the madder), some on polwarth, some on grey corriedale. Maybe there is a little of Malcolm the Corriedale in there too!

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And there has been even more bee swarm action in the neighbourhood.  These bees have taken up residence on a rainwater tank, with some support from a ladder! And… I am so over tending the silkworms 🙂

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June 18, 2014 · 1:28 pm

Dyes of antiquity: Usnea spp lichen

I could tell the Guild member who suggested that I be the one to use some of the plant dyestuffs that have been left at the Guild was as appalled as I was to see that there was a large plastic bag full of packs of lichens in one of the cupboards.  They were packaged up in such a way as to suggest they might have been purchased dried from a supplier in a time when understanding of the precarity of lichen was less widespread.  Concern for the wellbeing of dyers and the planet is widespread at the Guild now and I assume, it was widespread there in the past when levels of information were different, too.  I think it would be well recognised now that these are not sustainable dyes.  And to be honest, the descriptions of the colours some of these lichens will give made me wonder why anyone would disturb something so slow growing when there are prolific sources readily accessible in the suburbs.  No point asking now. No way to know when these lichens were harvested, either.  I am guessing, many years ago.

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The only thing sadder than these lichens having been killed for dyeing would be composting them without using them at all–So I chose one of the types of lichen for which I could readily find instructions and began what is going to be a lengthy investigation. Out of the bag with ‘Usnea spp’ and into rainwater for a long soak.

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I took Karen Casselman’s advice and steeped for some days in an alkaline solution before heating and cooling several times.

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On the big day (9 days after beginning), I strained out the lichen—using a pair of preloved pantyhose which had been thoughtfully brought into the Guild for just such purposes to strain out all the itty bitty lichen particles.  Then the diluting, heating and dyeing began.  One of my new rolls royce sampler cards (two different mordants, two different applications of each) and 50g of Polwarth entered the pot.

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I simply don’t have the experience to know whether I did something wrong, or the age of the lichen made a difference, or what-but both my sample card and my fleece turned tan while the dye bath remained orange.

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Not so special, in my opinion.

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The stash of dyestuff also included many items that were labelled, and some which were identifiable without labels, and then there were some like this:

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I checked with my sweetheart, who was a long time woodworker.  She said ‘looks and smells like meranti to me’. This looks quite unlike osage orange, sandalwood and logwood (all of which were present in the trove from the Guild).  I did a test… and nothing exciting happened. This batch of wood shavings went to the compost.

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The rest was sorted out and repackaged and relabelled where necessary.  Ready for further dyeing adventures!

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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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December 10, 2013 · 9:00 am

The never-ending parade of slippers

I have been working on some slippers… with long breaks in between activity… for such a long time! They came of some polwarth fibre that was not promising enough for fine spinning and that I thought would be best rendered into felt.  This is my go-to classic felting pattern, Bev Galeskas’ Fibertrends Clog pattern.  If you’re a regular around here you know by now that I have made many dozens of them.  I still think this pattern is genius… but  I am a little bit over it just at present, personally.  Anyway… some of these pairs had already suffered the indignity of being unsuccessfully dipped into indigo.  Time to try again!  I decided to pre-wet for evenness for once in my life.

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Finally, the time came for unnatural dyeing. I have two burners, and four pairs of slippers.  They’re big!  I decided to exhaust the dye and re-use the water on the second round of dyeing, which worked well.  It seemed a perfect opportunity to try this strategy out–after all, I am dyeing over chocolate brown wool for the most part.  Fine details of colour are not of real moment.

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Finally, I give you purple over brown, green over brown, red-brown-black (using up the leftovers of dyeing adventures past) and blue over brown.

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Sadly I’ll not be able to hand them over in person but I can’t bear to make my friends wait any longer!  We have had unseasonably cold weather here of late, and credibility on the question of whether they will ever see these slippers must be stretched to a very fine thread already!  So I am going to give them to a mutual friend who I am hoping will be happy to drop them in to warm chilly toes at the next opportunity.

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November 11, 2013 · 4:03 pm

Local yarnbombing…

Some of the recent trash batt yarns and some other odds and ends have begun their life in the wider world as yarn bombs. I set out for a stroll with three swatches.

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This was the first to go up.  It’s an all trash batt–including overlocker waste. As I began to attach it to its wonky, leaning pole, a father rode past on his bike accompanied by a child, also on a bike.  He called out to the child: ‘Look, there’s someone yarnbombing!’ and stopped to tell me about the best yarn bomb he ever saw (on Kangaroo Island).  I admit, I had not expected to be the subject of instruction to small children.  Since I was in my own neighbourhood, next came a friend who lives nearby, and then another (I introduced them) and there was speculation about the Viva La Broad Bean yarnbombers/guerilla gardeners and other yarnbombs in the vicinity.  The Broad Beans were appreciated and complimented in their absence.

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This one has gone up on a pole which is topped by a mirror to allow visibility around a tricky corner.  It turned out the tea cosy I made from this yarn contained all but the last few felted bits and bobs, so this is mostly a natural grey yarn bomb.  Yes, the stitching is going in two directions. In a moment of whimsy I decided to pick up and knit the second half at ninety degrees to the first, partly so the felted parts wouldn’t all be along an edge.

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Finally, this is on one of the main access points for the local train station (yes, that is a suburban train in the background).  This yucky greenish paint is the one preferred for public transport infrastructure and fencing in our area, and it could certainly use improvement.  These colours are from coreopsis and indigo.

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I have placed these friendly emblems on either side of the Viva La Broad Beans’ guerilla garden and yarnbomb festival in hopes it will encourage the Broad Beans and contribute to the neighbourhood cheering up programme. The evening I saw the Broad Beans’ handiwork for the first time, a neighbour engaged me in a painful, heartbroken conversation about all that has happened locally in the last year.  I took her to see the guerilla garden to cheer her up. As I left home this time, and before I could apply crochet hook to pole, she chased me down the street and I had a long conversation with her about anger and grievances, loss and grief.

As one of the friends who came by and stayed to chat while I was applying knitting to pole said, there has been a lot to contend with and a lot to make people feel discouraged in our area over the last year.  She said the Viva La Broad Beans’ handiwork had made her feel a whole lot better and uplifted her.  I hope I can make a small contribution by their side.

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November 1, 2013 · 2:28 pm

Silkworms: 7 week update + more wild textured spinning

Well, here are the late bloomers. Yes, only 5 left.

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Everyone else is in here now in another form…

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And meanwhile I decided to try a spinning challenge set up on Ravelry… a yarn generator based on a date system.  What genius on the part of its originator! Sounded like fun to me… I put in the date for my birthday and that meant creating a yarn that incorporated autowrapping (see that rayon thread over the white section?), metallic elements (there are strange and peculiar glitter pompoms from the op shop as well as sparkly gold fibre and gold recycled ribbon)…

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Yellow is required too, so there is some of the coreopsis dyed corriedale, some yellow preloved ribbon (there has to be fabric spinning too), and last year’s silk cocoons…

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Then there is chain plying and the ever present eucalyptus dyed merino… and one mighty strange yarn overall!

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October 29, 2013 · 1:40 pm

Textured spinning and trash batts

I went on a weekend away with members of my Guild recently and had a fabulous time chatting, spinning and eating way more than made any sense.  I took some little packs I made up beforehand, each designed to create a skein of yarn. This first one began as Finn cross locks I bought pre-dyed and perhaps a little felted, with curly tips.  Perfect for this technique, I thought.

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Here they are as a lockspun yarn, with the teased-out, butt ends of the locks corespun around a crossbred grey wool core that can no longer be seen, and the curly tips on display.

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This batt of unloved green fleece that I was given includes some orange silk noil and some pre-dyed mohair locks.

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Here it is corespun over that same grey crossbred core.  I learned these two techniques from the fine writing and DVDs of Jacey Boggs.

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The trash batt experiments continue!  This is eucalyptus dyed carder waste (and nepps pulled out as I was spinning) carded with white and tan Polwarth locks.

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I used it for my first attempt at a  new textured spinning technique–a friend gave me a copy of The Wheel that contained this technique and you can also see it here.  It originates with Steph Gorin, who demonstrates here.  (The video also includes advertising for Ashford.)

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Here is the outcome of a batt made with the flick carding waste from the blue lockspun yarn above, and a eucalyptus dyed carder waste and polwarth batt.

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Finally, a gratuitous picture of what appears to me to be valerian in flower in my garden.  Which is gorgeous apart from the fact that I bought it because it was soapwort.  It doesn’t look like any soapwort I have ever seen now it is in flower, which makes me glad it wasn’t big enough to harvest until now!

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