Historic Fibers

Feature

Happy Labor Day to those in the U.S. who have the day off. As some of you know, my birthday always falls on Labor Day weekend, and I have been having a good time. First of all, there was an assortment of cake from a fabulous Austrian bakery here in town:

I spent much of the weekend in a buttercream coma. There were cards and phone calls and emails from well-wishers, all of which I greatly appreciated. And some long-awaited, much-anticipated CDs that I had ordered finally showed up on The Day, and that was a very nice surprise.

After I got done teaching my class, I spent the day natural dyeing some warps and skeins. I offered to make some towels for Maia, and I had a lot of undyed 8/2 cotton thread. I decided to wind several 100 strand, 4 yard warp bundles, and then mix them on the loom to come up with something interesting and unique. Maia is particularly fond of yellow at the moment, so I dyed several different shades:

From left to right, we have osage, kamala, fustic, cutch, and an osage/logwood green. The fiber is still wet in this photo, so it will dry several shades lighter than this. I haven't done much natural dyeing on cotton, and I'ver never tried to dye warp before, so this was all an experiment.

Getting cotton to take dye evenly is much more of a challenge than dyeing wool, since the strands will stick together and resist the dye. The skeins all dyed evenly, so that was good. I chained the warps to prevent them from tangling, and where the strands overlapped, they did resist the dye, resulting in a striated effect. It is particularly apparent on the osage warp, but since that will dry the lightest, I don't think it will be a problem once it is woven off. In fact, I'm calling it a feature.

I'm dyeing several more bundles today and am extremely curious to see how this will all turn out. Natural dyeing is always somewhat random, since the tiniest variable can affect the end product. Particular dyes, such as the kamala, do especially well in alkaline environments, as is the case with dyeing cotton (wool prefers acid bases), so it has been interesting to test dyes that I haven't had much luck using on wool. No matter what I get from the dyepots, I can find a way to turn the variables to my advantage.

Screeching Halt

I was soldiering on through Kristine's Socks this weekend, and got a lot done. I finished all 9-1/2 inches of the legs, all 30 decreases, the heel flaps, and turned the heels:

They look pretty good. The problem? Notice those eensy little balls of yarn. That is all the yarn that is left, and I still have to do the entire foot. Eek.

I have emailed Kristine for instructions, but no answer yet. That seems to be a theme this week - asking lots of questions of lots of different people who have not yet responded. Oh well. Maybe it's time to return to the Scotland Sweater for a short sock vacation.

Wine, Women, and Wheels

Friday night was the monthly spin-in at Knit One One in Berkeley, and I had a great time hanging out with my fiber friends. I was spinning some glorious yak/merino from Tactile on the drop spindle:

Later I switched over to the wheel, but did go back later to ply the yak. Here it is, after wet finishing:

I also took along Thea's Towels to show off, and they got lots of love. I ended up brokering a deal with Maia - she is going to trade me some weaving yarn that she has had sitting around in exchange for some of my handwoven towels! Should be fun. 

Topics of conversation ran the gamut, as they always do at these things. They ranged from Strange Tan Lines, to Prescription Medications We Have Known and Loved (Ambien, how I adore thee), and segued into Pets With Substance Abuse Problems. I'm still laughing about some of the stories I heard.

Wine, women, and wheels - the perfect way to kick off an excellent weekend.

Just the Facts

I don't imagine this post will be all that fascinating for most of you, but the blog is really useful for me to document my projects for future reference. Who knows, this information may be useful to someone at some point.

For Thea's towels, I wound a three yard 360-thread warp of 8/2 cotton. Warping front to back, I sleyed a 12-dent reed using a 1-2-2 threading, and got a sett of 10 epi (Robin came to the rescue for this by suggesting the threading, since I only had a 12 dent reed and really needed a 10 epi sett). I ended up with a warp that was 18 inches wide, and I threaded the heddles using a Finnish Bird's Eye pattern from Marguerite Davis's Green Book.

For the first towel, I used four different colors of 8/2 cotton weft, and wove 6 inches of each color in a different treadling. The ends of each towel were done in plain weave with a 10/2 cotton so the hems wouldn't be too bulky.

For the second towel, I used an 8/2 chocolate brown weft throughout (except for the plain weave hems, which were again woven with a 10/2 cotton). I did two end panels of 6 inches each in the same treadling, and did the center panel in a treadling variation for 12 inches.

I also did a sample at the end of the warp using a heavier softball cotton as weft, and that is rather nice. I may use this in the future.

To finish the towels, I washed them in the hottest machine wash cycle available and used Earth Hues cotton scour to open up the fibers. This was the first time I used the cotton scour for this, and it really seemed to help make the towels extra soft and absorbent. I will definitely do this again.

Those are the facts!

Thea's Towels

I wove off the warp over the weekend, and today I want to talk about what the finished products mean, which to me is really more important than what they actually are. I'll talk about the technical specs tomorrow.

When I was growing up, there was a woman who essentially served as a second mother to me. Her name was Thea. She was my best friend's mom, and my best friend was an only child. So naturally, I got invited along and included in lots of activities to give my friend some age-appropriate company. Thea was born in Germany, and lived through World War II. She was an amazing cook, and I always loved her story about how during the war, the one thing she missed most were onions. When the war ended and she got her hands on an onion for the first time in years, she peeled it and ate it like an apple.

Thea also loved music, and she instilled in me a love for classical music. She always had classical music on the radio or the stereo. She loved jazz too, and for years her family hosted a Polish jazz band who came every year to perform at the local jazz festival.

I loved their house. It was full of an eclectic melange of antiques and modern furniture artfully mixed (and if you know anything about design, this is an incredibly difficult style to do well). Her kitchen was bright and cheerful - reds and oranges - and extremely functional. There were always people coming and going, and a happy hum of activity in that house.

Thea died a few years ago, and she had always wanted to be buried in Germany. So her daughter and I went to Germany, to the small town where she had grown up and that I had heard stories about for years, to make the arrangements and see her off. It was an amazing experience. People came from all around - from the US, from the UK, from her small hometown, and one of the Polish jazz musicians came to play her favorite song on the trumpet at the funeral. Her friends and family in Germany took great care of us, and I know we got to go places and do things that tourists never would. The day we arrived in Germany, the local church was performing a Bach requiem, and of course we attended. It seemed only fitting.

When I chose the colors for the towels I wove, I chose them for Thea's kitchen. Her daughter still lives in the family home that she inherited from her mother. I will send off the towels I wove for Thea with love and gratitude, for she taught me a lot about what is good in this world.

Thy Eternal Summer

With classes starting today, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about the end of summer. To that end, here's 
some beloved Shakespeare:


Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


William Shakespeare, Sonnet #18

On the Way

I am really going to push through Kristine's socks, because look what is on its way to me (scroll down)! Oh, the wooly goodness. Oh, the gorrrrrrgeous colors. I can hardly wait.

Happy Warp

The table loom is warped! Oh, happy day. Here's the proof:

I got this Schacht table loom second hand over a year ago, and solved the issue of the miswound warp threads by warping the loom front to back. Evidently, when warping front to back the order of threading isn't nearly as crucial since the threads will be tied on in the order that they were threaded. Thanks to Robin for setting me straight on that one. I wound this warp over a year ago as well, intending to make some dish cloths for one of my very dearest friends. There are alternating strands of orange and fuschia, and those are her colors. This is really a cheerful-looking warp.

Here is the weft:

I'm doing a bird's-eye twill pattern, which is basically little diamond shapes with dots in the center, and I'll be experimenting with these colors to see what works best. I need to figure out how long I want the cloth to be so I can calculate how much of each color to weave in. And I will be changing the treadling with each color change to get variations on the pattern. This sort of a sampler is known as a "gamp" in weaving terms. Hopefully, the recipient of the completed cloth will be as happy as the colors I have chosen.

Duty Calls

Duty calls, and I wish it would just be quiet. Inexplicably, classes start next week - how did that happen? I've been busy updating my course syllabus and website so I can bear the bright, shiny, expectant faces that will greet me come Monday, knowing I have done my best. I'm teaching two sections of the colonial half of the U.S. History survey this semester - I'm a 20th century historian, so naturally I usually get assigned the colonial stuff, which is fine.

I enjoy teaching this course, and I also have a legitimate excuse to subject my students to a spinning demonstration when I talk about the American Revolution, since women used spinning as a form of political protest. They boycotted the British commercial textile industry and went back to spinning and weaving their own cloth to avoid having to pay tariffs. To a contemporary classroom, this sounds like a sweet, quaint, nostalgic form of protest, but I want them to really get how much work and commitment was involved for these women. I take them through the preparation of raw fleece and spinning. I haven't yet brought a loom in to show them weaving, but I may this time since I have a warped loom at the moment. More about that tomorrow.

I have also virtuously been working on Kristine's socks, since I feel duty-bound to complete them before autumn really sets in. If you recall, these are to be mid-calf length socks - longer than the typical sock - and Kristine has voluptuous calves. Therefore, I have needed to do some shaping:

Here we have the socks with about 20 stitches decreased. I need to do another 10 decreases, and then it's clear sailing. I don't know that I would have chosen these colors for myself, but Kristine dyed the sock yarn and I think she was trying to get a representation of all the colors she uses in her handdyed line. The colors are working well in this pattern, so I hope she will be pleased. It is still early days on these socks - I have only about 4-1/2 inches done, and need to have 9-1/2 inches for the legs, with still the eye of partridge heel and the foot to go. Hopefully, once the decreases are done they will fly along, because I have plans when my obligations are completed!

Rubbish and Ply

Yesterday was garbage day, that day when the Davis Waste Removal people come around with their big truck and empty the trash bins. Normally, this is a fairly uneventful occurrence, but not yesterday. I had an issue, had to call the city office, and we had a conversation:

Me: I'm having a bit of a difficulty. When the garbage trucks came around this morning, they put a dent in my trash bin. Aesthetically, I don't have a problem with that, but it pushed out the side just enough that I can't get it back through my gate.

DWR: {sympathetic noises}

Me: I tried whacking the dent with a big hammer . . .

DWR: {uncontrollable giggling starts}

Me: . . . but it wouldn't budge {uncontrollable giggling starts}

(I guess it's just the mental image of a grown woman trying unsuccessfully to wrestle a hopelessly misshapen garbage bin through the back gate, then whacking it with a big hammer.)

DWR: (Recovering her composure) I'll send someone out to try and fix it, and if they can't fix it, they will replace the bin. How will they recognize it?

Me: It has a huge dent in the side! {coming completely unglued, with more uncontrollable giggling}

DWR: {uncontrollable giggling}

Oh me, oh my. That was ridiculously hilarious. Maybe you had to be there.

Moving on, I finally plied the tortoise shell singles, and they no longer resemble tortoise shell at all, but are rather nice nonetheless. We started with this hand dyed merino/tencel roving:

Which was spun into these singles:

And then three-plied to become this:

I ended up with two of these:

I got two skeins with 243 yards each, fingering weight. Looks like socks to me.