Uggg. What's wrong with this picture...nothing...except

I am not really a weaver, but I have to do something with the ever growing spinning stash I am building up. Besides, the major project for Master Spinners Level 5 is to make something in either linen or cotton that takes 50 hours. First, I chose linen. It is a pleasure to spin. Cotton, well, it's okay, but heck, it is cheap enough to buy already spun. Flax on the other hand, shines, has an earthy smell, and satisfies.
I have now spent, hmmm, well over 30 hours spinning flax. I have spun dew retted, water retted, tow, line and bleached flax. I have spun it Z and spun it S. I have a stack of flax now spun into lovely linen yarns.
With all that linen I decided to weave 3 tea towels. Why do one? With all the work it takes to warp a loom, you really have to make more than one thing at a time. So I spent, hmm, another 8 hours putting on a dummy warp. Why spend tall those hours on just 3 finished products, I figured I would save oodles of time by using a dummy warp and then leaving it on after my 3 tea towels and then I can just add a new warp and skip the having to put the yarns through the heddles and slaying the reed each time. Besides it would save 18 inches of wasted yarns.
So I just spent , oh, umm, about another 4 hours sleying the reed when, almost finished I realized I had the wrong reed on! I am aiming for 20 ends per inch and I stupidly used a 5 dent reed, and ended up with 10 ends per inch not 20. It was going so well. You would have thought I would have figured out there was something wrong hours ago. But no, it was only when I thought, hmm, this tea towel sure is wide. So like my knitting adventures, it is three steps forward and two back.

Spinning. All the way to Alaska

'Eltaa' (shaman's spiritual powers)
by Kathleen Carlo, 2005

In July, I had an opportunity to go on a cruise to Alaska with my parents. This is a perfect trip for people who don't have a lot of 'travel energy' (not me! My parents).  They loved it and so did we. this was the year to do it, July was the calmest month for the seas, hardly any wind or waves for the whole trip. The food was fantastic which was offset by the best view on board being from the treadmills in the gym!

My wheel after being fixed
(note the large white
outline of the 'scar'.

I decided to bring my 'Joy', spinning wheel. The rooms are small but there was enough space to entertain two couples sipping daily rituals of gin and tonic and doing a little spinning before sitting down to a late dinner.
However, let this be a warning to others contemplating taking their wheel --carry the wheel on and off the ship yourself. Don't leave it to baggage handlers. I stupidly let them take it thinking the padded bag and the fact that the boat was only 100 yards away would be protection enough. No. When I unzipped the bag there was a horrendous dent in the wheel. Luckily this did not affect the way the wheel operated, but it would need repair before moisture worked its way into the scarred wood causing it to expand and possibly warp the wheel making it unusable. I have a clever brother-in-law who was able to fix it in time for me to take it on another trip the following week.

Back to Alaska...While the glaciers in Glacier Bay were beautiful, and the scenery wild and wonderful, it was the museums that held treasures for me. It is strange that on the cruise, they promoted and advertised 'adventure' activities - take a train to see the Yukon Trail Railway; charter a helicopter to see the glaciers; take a 2 hour float plane ride; ride a dog sled; hike the wilderness; zipline through the rain-forest, etc. etc. Not a word about the local museums. Some people enjoy hair raising, heart pounding outdoor adventures. I do. But a beautifully made textile makes my heart pound and the hair on my neck stand up too!
We lucked into a few things, a couple of which I will do special posts on later (one being a somewhat unknown Coast Salish Blanket).
The Alaska State Museum has an exhibit of Ravenstail weavings. Wow. This is an awesome exhibit, dance aprons, tunics and leggings. Ravenstail weaving is worth a separate post. For now, here's a teaser.

Oh, I did manage to spin 200 meters of plied linen and spin up samples for three assignments: fake cashmere (rayon) and wool blend; soy; and corn silk, between the G&T's and the meals.

Never-ending Project - UFO to NEO/NEK

[Photo: My UFO weaving]

I have discovered fibre people have their own language. Their use of weird words (e.g. nep, noils, niddy-noddy, nostepenne and that is just the n's) and acronyms (KAL aka knit-a-long, VGM aka vegetable matter) can leave you confused and/or mystified. Knowing that once you understand what on earth they are talking about, you will have arrived. You can announce to the world 'Yes, world. I AM a knitter. - insert weaver, spinner, tapestry weaver, tatter, spranger, etc. Side note: And yes, I know, those last two are tough ones as only tatters and sprangers know who they are. Which means they have already arrived. In other words sprangers and tatters are born not made.
In any event I was curious to know what UFO's were and was not surprised to find that I had lots of those UnFinished Objects. Take my weaving on the 24" loom.  It just sits there waiting for me to be once again, inspired.  I am working up to it, now that I have a couple of weaving workshops under my belt this year. But I am very embarrassed to admit that in January 2010 my blog complained about it being unfinished.  My Gowd, that is almost 3 years of complaining!  

[Photo:My Never Ending Knitting (NEK)
 It just keeps repeating.
 Undo.  Redo.  Undo, Redo,
Unravel, knit, unravel, knit...]

Related to this but by no means the same, is a new acronymn, and maybe every knows this but I have a feeling I may be one of the few who knows and has this--NEO or to be more specific NEK. Never Ending Object (note NEProject or NEP has already been taken)or Never Ending Knitting. NEO or NEK is a type of UFO but the worst type. It is the project that is active and never ending. It does not sit around waiting, wishing for attention. No. It is that dastardly project that you have to work on, rip out, redo, rip out, redo, repeat. Yes, dear readers you have met my NEK, that colourful Holden shawl, the one that is so easy to do. The one on me needles for, oh, say, 10 or is it 12 months. The one where I learned about life lines. Yes, I find myself unraveling yet another row. Again. It had been living the life of a UFO for so long that I had forgotten on which needle side the un-knitted yarn should come from. And so, I knit backward instead of forward making half the shawl longer than the other half. Sigh.
On the other hand, thank god for those life lines and, I now have a WIP (Work In Progress) and not another UFO.

Just like dinner

Stephanie from Knotty by Nature showed off her elegant silk shawl at the 25th Annual Island Weaving and Spinning Retreat in Parksville. The warp and weft are handspun silk. Stephanie was challenged when someone told her you can't use silk singles for warp. So she set out to do just that. She dyed the silk by, err, umm, mistake but the colours are subtle, harmonious and beautiful. It took her a year to spin the yarn and a week to weave it, 'just like dinner' she said. Think about it.

Coast Salish Blankets - a Mass Spec Update

[Photo: Salish robe, 1838-1842, Wilkes Expedition,
from the Smithsonian collection, #E2124-0]

Big news in the Coast Salish weaving world. Researchers from York University analyzed nine Salish textiles (blankets, trump lines) at the Smithsonian to try to determine what fibres were used. They used a mass spectometry technique (a way to identify molecules by their mass) to solve the question 'is there dog hair in the blankets?'  
This question has been nagging at those interested in these blankets for a long time. It is a weird question. We have Coast Salish oral history telling us this is so. We have written logs/diaries by early explorers like Capt. Vancouver, also saying dog wool was used. We have artists who wrote and even painted what was probably a wool dog (Paul Kane). But we still want 'proof'. Interesting that 'proof' has a hierarchy, which I suspect goes something like this: artwork somewhere at the bottom, then oral history, written diaries and logs, official documents, and then there is scientific 'proof' at the top. And even scientific proof has hierarchies depending on what is trying to be proven.  'Proof' has layers. One layer of proof builds upon another until you have the full story of the 'ultimate truth'. Different layers take a weak proof like a myth and builds onto it. Each layer builds more certainty in the proof. Add more layers, and the myth solidifies until you have an irrefutable fact. More proof makes it more solid, like a textile.

[Photo: Salish robe, from the
 Smithsonian collection,E1891-A]

With the wool dog fibre, the proof story goes something like this:

1. Oral history tells of the wool dog and it's wool being used in blankets and robes..
2. Early explorers (Capt. Vancouver) records the use of dog wool in textiles.
3. Early artists (Paul Kane) painted a dog that could be a wool dog and wrote of wool dogs, but artists license means this in not 'proof that the dog existed or looked like what Paul Kane sketched or painted'.
4. Eye-balling the fibre in Salish blankets show at least two different fibres, but many animals, like the Mtn Goat have an outer coat and a downy coat. So even if there are two different types of fibre, it doesn't prove that they belong to two different animals.
5. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to look at fibre magnified to see differences, but it wasn't reliable for fibres that are very old as fibres can wear. A new fibre will easily show the scales on the outside but old fibres rub and wear down those scales, so it isn't conclusive when looking at the outside of the fibre. And even if the old fibre was in really good shape, we need a wool dog fibre as the baseline to compare with. How can we identify a wool dog fibre if we don't know what one looked like in the first place? No wool dog, no proof.
6. Carbon isotope analysis - This research showed that some fibres came from an animal that ate a diet of marine food. Wool dogs were fed salmon, but carbon isotope analysis can only prove that the animal did eat marine food but can not 'prove' that the marine food was salmon, nor that animal eating the marine food is a dog. See this blog for more info.
7. 1997, Osteometry (analyzing the bones) showed that there were two species of dog in the Pacific Northwest coast. This helped prove that there was intentional breeding to keep the two species apart. Why would they want to? There must have been a benefit in keeping the breeds pure, but what that reason was we can only surmise it was for the wool of one of the species. A forensic artist used the bones to sketch out what the dog could look like and there is a resemblance to the Paul Kane sketch and painting. But that doesn't prove it.
8. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis - split hairs. Someone came up with the idea that if SEM wasn't reliable for old worn fibres, then what about the inside of the fibre? Split the hair and then magnify it. Lo and behold, it turns out that the inner hair tells a lot and is very useful for telling fibres apart. But, you still need to know what a wool dog fibre looks like in the first place.
9. Then, in 2006 in a dusty drawer somewhere in the Smithsonian, someone finds Mutton, a wool dog' or at least what is left of Mutton -- his pelt, which had been donated to the museum sometime. We now have a wool dog fibre! We have the baseline to compare old robes and blankets with.
10. Back to SEM and now we can compare a Mtn Goat fibre with a wool dog fibre. Check out the picture in this blog posting.
11. DNA analysis has been used to identify DNA in a Salish Blanket as being from a dog. Other blankets showed DNA from a Mtn. Goat. So DNA can be used to identify fibres in textiles. We are still waiting to hear more about this ongoing research at the Smithsonian.
12. Mass spectometry - identifies dog hair in the textiles and this is the research that was recently announced.

Yes, there now seems to be 'scientific proof that dog hair was used in some Salish blankets. Or put another way, there is now 'scientific proof' that what people said, saw and wrote about did indeed exist. And, we now have a host of techniques that can be used to help identify dog hair being used in blankets.

Click here to see all my posts on the wool dog and Salish blankets.

Here are a couple of books you might be interested in: 
Working with Wool, a Coast Salish Legacy . Although it looks at the history of the Cowichan Sweaters, it covers the history of the wool too.

And Paula Gustafson's Salish Weaving . Although it is out-of-print, it is currently the best book available on the history of Coast Salish weaving. I am awaiting eagerly Leslie Tupper's book which I believe should be close to being available.

Scarf project

[Photo: 2.25 wool/llama scarves]

I am still learning to weave, but more importantly, I am learning more about fibre. How does different fibre structures react in a weaving? And why you "full" a weaving as part of the finishing. To demonstrate.....I decided to play with various blends of white wool and black llama and create a scarf that used different percentage blends that would give various shades of gray. I wanted a scarf for my husband, hence it needed to be ‘manly’ and the shades of greys produced for the blends looked very suitable. I decided to warp enough for weaving two or three scarves (the first hint that indecision or impreciseness doesn't always work).
Preparation: I carded washed wool and llama separately and created a series of batts of each fibre. I then blended the fibres in different percentages in the drum carder and ran them through twice again to get homogenous blends. I created a variety of llama/wool blends: 80/20; 70/30; 66/33; 50/50; 33/66; 30/70 and 20/80 for the warp. I used the 50/50 blend for the weft.
Spinning: I sampled spinning yarns at different ratios and settled on 6:1 ratio using a semi-worsted backward draft. I counted the treadling which was 8 out and 2 in, producing: WPI of 12; TPI of 2.25; & Twist Angle 25˚. Weaving: The different blends were used in the warp on my 4 shaft Leclerc Artisan loom. The first scarf was done as a plain weave. The second scarf was done as a 1:3 twill but I forgot to hook up my peddles correctly hence, ended up with 1:3 on one side and 3:1 on the other. I did not have enough warp for a third scarf but there was enough warp for me to do a sample and try the twill again, this time hooking up the treadles correctly and was able to weave 14 inches. This became a neck cowling rather than a sample as I think it had the nicest handle before fulling. This was my favorite and I really regretted not having enough warp to do that third scarf!

Finishing: The scarves were taken off the loom and then the fringes were twisted and knotted. Mistakes in the weaving were fixed. The scarves were then taken to a friend, Norah Curtis, who is a sweater designer and also designs the wool fabric for the sweaters. She is an expert at fulling fabric. I did worry about the different blends shrinking/fulling at different rates. I expected them too but was not sure about how much difference would occur and how much it might impact the scarves but Norah and I checked every minute to see what was happening and were ready to pull them out of the wash if needed. Norah has a top load washing machine and we filled it with hot water 38˚-40˚ with Dawn dishwashing soap. Norah looked the fabric and said 3 -4 minutes would probably do it but we still checked every minute. We turned the washer on to slow and set the one minute timer. At the one minute mark we stopped the machine and squeezed the scarves to check them. At 4 minutes we decided they were ready. We removed the scarves, drained the washer and put the scarves back in for a rinse and spin cycles. They came out beautifully. The final finishing was to let them hang to dry, then steam them as they lay flat and then left them to dry. We measured the two scarves and the neck cowls before fulling and after:

[Photo:Twill before fulling]

Left: Twill before fulling

[Photo: Twill after fulling ]

Right: after fulling 

[Photo: Plain weave before
fulling]

[Photo: Plain weave after fulling]

Left: Plain weave before fulling

Right:  Plain weave after fulling

[Photo: Neck Cowl before
fulling]

Left: Neck Cowl twill before fulling

Right: Neck Cowl twill after fulling

[Photo: Neck Cowl twill after fulling]

A Cat's Head Basket

A lack of blog posts doesn't mean a lack of things to blog about, just a lack of time. Take this post for example, you'll see I have been busy with something a little different. 
I branched out (pardon the pun) into a slightly different branch of the fibre world and took a course in basketry from Joan Carrigan on Saltspring Island.
Joan is a very accomplished basketry artist. Check out her web site to see her gallery of works and see her workshop list.
What fun we had! A group of six of us met and worked side-by-side for the day on these Cat's Head baskets. Cat's head is from the shape of the basket when held upside down. It looks like a cat's head with each corner like ears on a round head.

   

We used red cedar for the main structure and used willow bark to weave a twill pattern onto and through the cedar. Yellow cedar was used to twine the edges together with a couple of rows of waxed linen thread to accent the rim. And just look at the finished baskets. So inspired, I have signed up for another one in a week.

Paisley - The Shawl, the museum

[Photo from Spurlock Museum]

If one is staying at Paisley, which is where the Glasgow International Airport is located, and if one is passionate about beautiful fabrics, then you must visit the Paisley Museum to find out about the famous Paisley shawls.
Paisley is, or was, a mill town.  According to our taxi driver, in its heyday, the two main mills (Coates-as in J. & P. Coats and Anchor threads) employeed 40,000 people.  Now they employ a mostly volunteer force to keep the Thread  Mill museum open 2 days a week. One of the mills has been turned mostly into flats.  The Coats mills still operates but on a much reduced basis.
I had hoped to visit the Paisley Thread Museum, the Anchor Mill and the Sma' Shot Cottage, a weaving history cottage, but these were only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays and this was a Tuesday.  Sigh.  But the Town Museum had some beautiful shawls and weaving equipment on display.
The weavers in Paisley based their designs on fabrics that came from Asia.  So they did not design the original Paisley shawls. Other mills were doing the same thing and producing copies of Eastern patterns, but in Paisley, they produced the shawls cheaper and quicker than other mills, hence they became more popular and more famous.  I thought it interesting that the museum pointed out that Paisley weavers were notoriously argumentative and British politicians always has a wary eye out for revolutionary actions emanating from Paisley.

The museum weaving expert was on holiday but we were allowed in to the weaving room to look at the equipment.  Pretty impressive.  There were a couple of Jacquard looms set up.  These looms used some of the fist computer concepts - the use of punch cards to control which warp threads were to be raised and which lowered.  This meant one could design complex and intricate patters -- voila, the Paisley patterns.

The shawl grew in popularity as the fashion trended to larger shawls and the design could be shown off by covering a woman's back from neck to ankle.  It was the bustle that killed the shawl. The whole idea of a skirt bustle was to highlight the rear and covering shawls were not wanted. So ended the power of Paisley.  It left me wondering how a town goes about finding jobs for 40,000 out-of-work people? And why didn't the tourist trade try to capitalize on that history?  I was all pumped up to buy a Paisley shawl but pickings were slim.

Victoria Inspiration

[Photo: Jean Betts showing her splendid coat
made from many scraps of  various textiles
she has woven]

I attended the Victoria Weavers and Spinners Guild on Thursday having heard that one of their best weavers, Jean Betts was giving a presentation on some of her recent work. I had to be in Victoria to do some research anyway so I added this to the schedule and come away inspired. Jean recently took a workshop with Dorothy Field, poet, writer, artist, intellectual extraordinaire. Here's a documentary about Dorothy.
The workshop was intended to push the artist and extend their creativity and Jean felt she was able to do that. She has woven for years and getting bored with the same old same old and this was a chance to try new things. Her theme was reuse, reinvent, recycle and rejuvenate. Napkins from Value Village were dyed, textiles, cut and added, Japanese rice wax resist, stitches adding details..well, you get the idea and the pictures tell the story. Jean discusses the workshop in more detail on her blog OneSmallStitch

Jean also showed a book on 'Boro' a Japanese word meaning rags. Impoverished people in the 19th and 20th Century patched and patched and re-patched their clothes creating beautiful textiles. They are now collectable and sell for a lot of money. Do a google for "Japanese boro" and you will find some interesting images and information about boro.

Investigating the use of goat and dog wool in Coast Salish blankets

First, a little summary background on the Coast Salish Wool Dog. There are many Coast Salish blankets in museums around the world. These are said to be made of Mountain Goat wool. Someone, somewhere (I'll have to find a good reference and check this out in more detail) analyzed the fibre from one blanket to figure out what the animal producing the fibre ate (carbon isotope analysis) and found that their diet consisted of 50-70% marine in origin. It is unlikly that Mountain Goat ate that much, if any, fish, so they are ruled out. So if these blankets aren't necessarily all Mtn Goat, what are they made of? 

In addition, there are many Coast Salish territories (Vancouver Island and Puget Sound for example) where Moutain Goat are not found, and from these areas we have Salish Oral history which establishes the existance of specially bred dogs used for their hair as wool in blankets.  

We also have records from some of the early explorers of the area mentionaing these dogs Capt. Vancouver wrote in 1792 while at Bainbridge Island: "...the dogs belonging to this tribe of Indians were numerous, and much resembled those of Pomerania, though in general somewhat larger. They were all shorn as close to the skin as sheep in England..." and the Spaniards while anchored off Nanaimo mention that the dogs "of moderate size, resembling those of the English breed, with very thick coats, and usually white."  

Paul Kane (see the blog posting below) sketched and painted what could be a Salish wool dog. And George Gibbs, surveyor, collector and interpretor/translater in the mid 1800's donated his pet wool dog 'Mutton' to the Smithsonian on its death (see the posting further down).  

So we have oral history, the written word, some possible visuals referring to the dog, and perhaps a preserved dog. And you would think there has to be some dog blankets in existance somewhere but how does one identify dog wool from goat wool? Perhaps some of these goat wool blankets were really dog wool or a combination.

In 2006, 'Mutton' the supposedly Salish wool dog, was found and dusted off and the USA National Museum of Natural History provided Anne Murray, a  Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Textile Conservation, with the hair of 'Mutton', some of goat, along with some fibres from Coast Salish blankets. The idea was to try and identify what a Salish dog hair fibre looks like and how it can be distinguished from goat fibre. This was done for visual identification using microscopy (scanning and polarized light) and then DNA analysis (mitochondrial). Both the structure of the hairs and the DNA anaylsis support that the blankets did have both Moutain Goat and dog wool. The picture on he left is from a poster overviewing the research done and shows Goat hair on the top and Mutton's dog hair on the bottom.

Mexico and the Rebozo Shawl

There have been a lack of blogs in the last few weeks but I have a good excuse - - The Yucatan. We just returned from a two week vacation. Highlights included:

• New Years at Chitzen Itcha
• Thousands of Pink Flamingos at Celestun
• Millions of bats emerging at dusk from a cave near Calakumal
• Visits to many of the Mayan ruins around the whole peninsula
• Bohemian beach days south of Mahahual

And, a couple of interesting purchases in a market in Carillio Puerto, a little town not exactly on the tourist maps but known for being the centre of the Caste Wars and home of the 'talking cross' which spoke to (via a ventriloquist) and directed the population into inspired battle. South of Telum (which IS on every tourist map), Carillio Puerto is very much a Mayan town and the market reflects it. In a tiny hardware stall in the mall I admired an ikat woven shawl lying on the counter. The Mayan man laughed, said something to his wife who also laughed and put 'her' shawl away. But minuted later she lay a brand new one on the counter also beautifully woven, so I purchased it along with four hammock shuttles which I figure could be useful for tapestry weaving. The Rebozo shawl is used for covering the head and shoulders, especially when entering a church, but is also very popular as a sling to hold babies close to your body. The Rebozo shawl is apparently disappearing quickly with many weavers retiring, demand declining, and younger people not taking weaving up. Here's a video showing the process.

Coast Salish Woven Fabrics - More questions than answers

Salish Weaving

I am curious to know more about traditional Coast Salish woven fabrics, especially those collected pre 1830s. Coast Salish weavings can be incredibly complex. Techniques include twining (double, simple, three-strand), openwork, overlay, tapestry and twill. Some of the patterns were very intricate and made of fibres from dog wool/hair, nettle and mountain goat wool. There is even reference to one that included down. 
Paula Gustafson in her book Salish Weaving writes that she has examined most of the blankets in North American museums and has only seen one of dog hair. So how come so many descriptions and records of wool dogs by some of the early explorers of the area? And where are all these rugs, blankets and other fabrics made from dog hair?

Grant Keddie, from the Royal BC Museum tells me that UVic is getting an electron microscope and there is an expert there is working on analyzing the hairs to try and figure out if they are goat, dog or a mixture. He suggests it is time to re-examine some of these treasures using newer technologies to help solve some of these mysteries. Grant has been interested in the wool dogs for a long time (see Keddie, 1993, Prehistoric Dogs of B.C. Wolves in Sheep Clothing, the Midden, 25 (1)3-5, February. Grant is currently researching the history and use of Coast Salish spindle whorls. He also tells me that Susan Crockford is the local authority on doggie DNA and included archaeoloigal material from RBCM collection and Tatlan Bear dogs in her research. Check out her books and publications. And here is an article on the wool dog.

Some of my questions:

• What was the Salish wool dog? What did it look like? There is one painting by Paul Kane but is it an accurate likeness? Were wool dogs found up and down the coast of North America? Is there similar breed still in existence? What type of fibre was it? How long, how thick and how much crimp did it have?
• Many of the blankets were made from mountain goat wool. I don't think mountain goat existed on Vancouver Island, so they must have traded for it. So how common was weaving if the wool came from dogs or mountain goats. Was there enough wool to make this a common activity or a rare activity? If it was common, well, that's a lot of mountain goat and a lot of trade. Was there enough mountain goats? Or was dog wool more common? If weaving wasn't common, then that could explain why there was such value placed on blankets. But then, what was the common fabric?
• Where did the dye colours red, blue and black come from?  Yellows, tans. browns, oranges, greens come from a variety of possibilities (eg. wolf moss, oregon grape roots, alder bark) but a good black (salty mud?), blue or red (can alder bark really get the traditional reds?) is hard to come by.

Feel free to post any answers.
Speaking of the Royal BC Museum, they have a great exhibit which opens on Nov 20th. S’abadeb – The Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists. 

Edited to add a couple of related books.

Here are a couple of books you might be interested in: 
Working with Wool, a Coast Salish Legacy . Although it looks at the history of the Cowichan Sweaters, it covers the history of the wool too. And Paula Gustafson's Salish Weaving .