New Year, new wheel

[Photo: The twin Miss 2011's]

I ended the year with dye day and started the New Year with a new wheel. I think that bodes well. A bit symbolic.  
Dye day was exciting. Heather and I dyed while Nora, the knitwear designer and my mother (hi Mom) kept us company. We had three pots with mordants, each mordant (copper, iron, and alum) created a different shade or colour from the dye. We used Brazilwood for the dye and after dying, we used four different modifiers (acidic acid, alkaline, iron and copper) to get even more variety in colour and shades.

The two in the picture above are not Nora or my Mom, they are two Miss 2011 twin effigies. This is my tradition, to create an effigy every New Years. She attends the parties (3 this year) on New Years eve and people write down on a small piece of paper what they do not want to take with them into the New Year. The paper is stuffed down the front of Miss 2011 and at the stroke of midnight the effigy is burned taking with it the papers which holds the unwanted secrets of the participants.
Miss 2011 was in demand and needed to be at two parties at the same time, hence the twins. They are no more.

And to start the New year off is my new Ashford Joy. I wanted something shorter than my Lendrum but sturdier than my Louet Victoria and I think this is it. Let's see what she spins in 2012.

Black Walnuts

Black walnut.
From the left: handspun Suffolk x Corriedale
dyed with alum mordant and just above it,
cotswold with no mordant, a dye note showing
the colours achieved by using various mordants,
nuts, husks and walnut leaves, 

It's fall and the fall storms haven't yet rolled in. They have threatened but have not quite come ashore here. I swore last year that before they did and trees are blown bare, I would find some black walnut hulls and leaves to so some natural dye experiments. And while I was at it, I would gather some chestnut leaves while they were still somewhat green and hanging onto the tree. I suspect the colour is richer before they start to dry and fall off the tree and last year I got a nice silver grey from some dried out leaves. So just before a big storm that, in the end, petered out, I visited a friend's walnut trees, then a chestnut tree, and laden down with bits of tree, went home to experiment.
The first Black Walnut hulls experiment turned out to be, well, successful and interesting but a bit of a blah brown. If you like browns, it is just okay, not a rich deep brown, not a subtle tan although the Cotswold with no mordant has a nice sophisticated camel that grows on you, but then again, Cotswolds large cellular scale structure reflects light so well that any dye becomes lustrous, no matter how blah.

The dye room with black walnut hulls soaking,
black walnut ,leaves soaking and some drying,
elixir of black walnut in jars,
fibre being dyed in a crock pot with black walnut
elixer and a bucket of chestnut leaves soaking.

I went back to the books, and to Google and read up on how to get a darker colour. After all, it is called Black Walnut and I'd like a black or at least a deep deep chocolate brown. Turns out my blah brown is loved by many according to Google and satisfied with it, that is what they aim for. However, others have discovered that a heavy influx of iron: rusty nails, or using an old iron dye pot, failing that, spoonfuls of ferrous oxide added to the brew will get you to that more satisfying deep dark brown to almost a black. That is tomorrows attempt.

Socks to Dye For

I don't knit. Well hardly ever. When I do knit, it usually ends in a 3/4s done project or a mass of knotted fibres heaped into a bag for years as if expecting a fibre fairy to find it, fix it and finish it ... fabulously. Once in a while something gets completed and a poor soul has to live with my project. The last one was felted slippers for my father. Even after felting they are still size 22. Not exactly something that at age 80 his size 9's will ever grow into. 
So I am not sure how on earth I ended up in a socks-to-dye-for workshop. Socks for pete's sake! With heels and toes! But wait. I am getting ahead of myself. I never promised to actually knit socks, although the thought is festering in my mind. The inspiration came from the idea of dying the yarn to knit the socks. It's not your average dye job. The white yarn for the socks is knit two strands together into a long rectangular block which is then dyed. There is enough yarn in the block to unravel and re-knit into two socks, guaranteeing that each sock will have the exact same dye job. I even bought the sock blank already knitted. My now dyed sock blank just needs a sock knitter, someone with a knack of knowing how to turn a heel, and once I have found a sock knitter, then I'll re-post this blog entry and add the finished product. In the meantime, the picture above is the dyed sock blank...dyed in manly colours.
Posting date has been back dated for when it should have been posted.

Confined to barracks

I have been confined to barracks with Chicken Pox. Despite having it as a child, I have succumbed to it again. The miracle drug they gave me has made it very bearable. I have the red spots but feel pretty good. So what does one do when confined to barracks? Spin. Knit. Dye. Cook. Clean. Watch movies. Read and cruise the 'net. Not a bad life.  

I've been taking pictures of some natural dye material. Here's Japanese Green Tea (interesting grays with a greenish tinge) and Lac (reds) dye stuff. Lac is interesting. It is a excrement from an insect that parasitizes certain trees, mostly in Asia and Mexico. The insect colonies make a resinous cocoon from which the dyestuff is extracted. The resinous material is made into shellac and in the old days, into lacquer ware.  Who would have thought that insect excrement could be so useful?! I remember eating off 400 year old lacquer plates on a remote island off Guadalcanal thinking it most unusual to be there eating off such beautiful elegant dinner ware in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Knowing lac comes from insect excrement makes that dinner experience even more bizarre.

Colour

Last weekend was a dye weekend. I took a one day workshop with Ursa of Gaia's Colours . A fun day spent learning different dye techniques including splatter/speckle/sprinkle, space dying, immersion and kettle dying.
From this:

to this:

Colour Tools

I've recently found a few colour resources on the web to help design colourways and palates. The first one is colour palette generator, a great program for analyzing an online image and producing a colour palette from it. Here's the results of my Blog header image (see the top of the page).

Colour blender lets you input two colours and the number of midpoints (colours) you want between the two and it will output the colours needed to blend colour #1 with colour #2.


Peter Piper's Color Palette Picker is another great tool. I can see weavers flocking to this one for summer and winter weaves.

From Fleece to Batts

Encouraged by the dyed roving, I moved to the ten year old fleece.  Sometime in the past I must have sorted and cleaned it as it was in good condition.  So I just soaked it in hot water, heated up a pot of water and mixed some dyes in a few jars.  Then I found a brick of tussah silk and decided to dye that too.  For each colour, I added a batch of wool, some tussah silk and some mohair rovings (did I tell you  I had a stash!).  Once dry, I started to learn about drum carding and decided to card each colour into a sepeate batt.  I was careful to take each lock of wool and tease it apart.  Once I had done the pile I carefully placed each lock tip first into the carder.  Then once the carder was close to full (which I discovered on this carder that meant about 1 oz of fleece) I took it off, split it into four and recarded the batt.  Each batt I carded twice and twisted the batt into a bun for storage. Later, I can mix colours and fibres.  So here's some pictures of the silk and spun rovings drying, and the various stages from dyed fleece to batts.

Dyed Rovings

It has been a busy week between work and pleasure.  The pleasure of spinning colours had me back up in the loft digging into a basket holding a ten year old fleece, then into the laundry room, up onto the new washing machine and reaching up into the top shelf to retrieve old dyes, praying that I wouldn't lose my balance and end up colouring the laundry.

I started with some alpaca roving and read up on how to dye roving with many colours.  I followed the video from Rexenne on YouTube and the directions for the dyes I had.  Basically, squirt the dyes onto the roving, fold the roving up in kitchen wrap, place in a steamer and steam heat the dyes to set them.  It worked.  

The photo above shows the roving done in pinks and blues.  I also learned a new word: 'colourway'.  And colourways need names, so I named my colourway 'Sunset on Georgia Strait'. Here's the finished product, 2ply.