A Little Bit of Dyeing

About last November I suggested that the spinners of Kennet Valley Guild might like to spin a bit of several different types of fleece and I would dye them and we would see whether the different fleeces took acid dyes differently. Well this happened and all the skeins were returned to me by mid February. I intended to acid dye them. The weather has been too cold for working in the garage. BUT, if I don't return these skeins at next meeting (next Saturday), then they won't be returned till July. So yesterday I organised it all. Every skein was given its own label, a length of cotton tape knotted to the skein which has the fleece type and the spinners name on it in permanent ink. 19 spinners took part and  six different fleece types were used. The photo above shows the undyed skeins and the fleece type.

Today I set about dyeing in the kitchen. The first thing was to cover everything with plastic and then carry in the equipment. I  chose 7 colours (basically a rainbow) and one of each type of fleece was taken to form one dye lot and so 5 or 6 skeins (all different) were dyed in the same dye bath. I have been working at this since lunchtime and have done 5 colours. The first is dry already and they will all be ready by Saturday. Each lot takes more than an hour to complete. The results from four dye baths are shown below. You can see clearly that there is colour variation. All the skeins were washed in Synthrapol before starting the dyeing process. Sue Davies of the Guild will be presented with these on Saturday. She has a team of knitters lined up and they are going to knit diagonal squares, six inches on a side. All will be sewn into a blanket. As you all know, I am not a spinner but some of this handspun is  absolutely smashing and I will have to see if I can persuade someone to spin me enough to weave a scarf - or three.

Not quite finishing warping up

The last two days have been spent winding on  32 sections of the warp. I have now finished  (not got as far as winding on and threading up yet - that's still to do) and have been thinking - not that you can think while winding on with the AVL warping wheel because the counter has gone again. I replaced the original one  two or three years ago and it was very expensive to start with and then I had to pay duty and VAT on the cost of counter plus the shipping charges. So I am unkeen to do that again. What I did this time was count revolutions (four per thread) then put the thread through the cross and move on the counter manually by four. I could go on doing that but I might call in a favour and ask a mechanical engineer on my acquaintance to look at it.

An alternative which has occurred to me is to use a ghost warp where possible. The last three weavings were done on a ghost warp and took no time at all to tie and wind on. The problem is the sleying or rather the threads per inch. This one is 60 epi and 24 inches wide. The maximum usable width on the Megado is 38 inches so if I wanted to use all the threads as a ghost warp, I would have to restrict myself to a yarn which needed not less than 40epi. I can see a life in which I list Megado projects in decreasing epi and throw away the edge threads when I resley with a thicker yarn. Feasible. 

I don't have to decide now. The current threading is a straight draw on 32 shafts and certainly that would do for the next weaving. A bit of planning is required here. What must be done on the Megado? My current plan is to finish the warping up and weave enough to make samples for the Fine Threads Study Group, then depart for foreign parts and weave the rest when I get home.

The other job I have to do this week is to acid dye a lot of spun fibre. More about that and photos when I get going. I haven't done it so far because it has been too cold in the garage but I must have this finished this week so it will be done in the kitchen. With enough plastic sheeting down, it should be okay and all teh utensils will be dyeing utensils from the garage.

Today is blue skies and sunshine but still the temperature is below freezing and there is snow about. I inspected the garden this morning. We won't be having any peaches this year. The peach blossom started three weeks ago and never got a chance. The hellebores are looking very unhappy. Clematis Armandii, our thug, is paying no attention and is covered with flowers. Mind you, that is in a sheltered corner by the sittingroom window - and a robin pair are nesting in it this year. He's been carrying twigs bigger than himself into the leaves for several days. Most of the daffodils are looking unhappy but the above are not. They are some dwarf variety and are looking good which is cheering. The early camellia, Cornish Snow, usually starts flowering in December and goes through till March. Not this  year. It hasn't bothered starting and it is covered with flower buds as are all the camellias. 

 

I may not see them year. I am off in a few weeks time and spent yesterday on the web sorting out a visa for China. Next week I am taking all the documents up to Manchester to finalise the Chinese visa. My passport is plastered with strange documents - visas in strange languages. And the house is full of lists of things to do, things to buy, things to arrange.  My daughter, Ruth, is here over Easter and we will do some arranging then. I think she would like to come but seven weeks is too long for her job. Anyway Silk Route here I come!! I do intend to blog while away. My attitude to the blog is that it is like a diary only anyone can read it. It is surprising how often I look for a specific mention of something in order to fix a date.

 

I still have a few things to sort on the computers but intend to wind more warp on the Megado as a priority today. Which reminds me, I dreamt of looms and warps last night. Very odd. There were two large looms, one was the Megado and the other was more like a drawloom. Both were warped up for the Convergence 2010 piece!! The mind is very funny thing - am I worrying about a warp?

Final Castlemorton Common

Above is Castlemorton Common  and the Malvern Hills completed. Machine embroidery has been added as well as a stencilled rook and the pollarded black poplars. I worried about the back and the edges, thought about putting bias binding down the edges but was bothered by what colour to use. Eventually I steam ironed the edges, put black bias binding on the ends (which are folded out of sight anyway) and added iron-on black lining. They are all folded over the wooden batten and stapled down. The fabric is heavy and hangs well by itself. Using clasped weave with thick yarn does make the selvedge bulge.

 

I spent several hours on the computers yesterday and persuaded Bacchus and the lap top to speak to each other. I should explain that every computer we ever owned (except the current laptop) was given the name of a Classical god/goddess - here's the sting - who appears in an opera!! Possibly the most entertaining was a pair of identical laptops called Castor and Pollux. Sadly they were used for work and, when they got past it, were removed and destroyed. The current lot are Bacchus and Vulcan on Windows XP and Apollo and Diana which are Linux. Orpheus in the Underworld is a good source of names!! Iris and Neptune have died in the last year.

 

Mind you, I know a Government Department where the computers are named after cheeses. 'Stinking Bishop' anyone? I remember having to tell someone that 'Wensleydale is not booting up properly'. The answer was 'I think you had better use Cheshire'.

Family Weekend

On Friday, Dorothy and I went to the NEC at Birmingham for an exhibition 'Sewing for Pleasure' and we did get a lot of pleasure although I have spent rather a lot of money. A lot of this was on threads for the Castlemorton Common set which I will work on today. But it snowed a lot on Friday and went on snowing. My daughter, Ruth, arrived from the south (where it is not snowing) on Saturday and rushed out to buy a sledge. The weekend was spent cooking or so it seemed.

 

 

Because of the snow, the Saturday weaving class was cancelled. I don't remember us ever cancelling before and we have had to do it twice this year. About the only piece of textile work I have done is shown above. It is the cover for the second volume of the Jules Verne book. Today I will paste it to a piece of bond paper ready for bookbinding on Wednesday. In between all of this, I managed to install programs on the desktop computer which is about to be used for everything.  Lots of problems, mostly of 'where is the serial number` sort. So far I have only been forced to buy one new program - Powerpoint.  Very depressing. And I have discovered that this machine will not speak to my laptop. Oh well. More delving into Mr Gates's help and support. The weather is not conducive to viewing stately homes anyway so we shall be staying at home.

Exhibitions

I stencilled the pollarded poplars on to the Castlemorton weavings this morning. A bit of experimentation with cloth and colour can be seen on the left. These are drying out. Now I have to add leaves to some of the seasons but Winter (extreme left) is finished. I like that one. These are for the Midlands Textile Forum Exhibition at Craven Arms.

 

Other exhibitions were visited in London on Tuesday in the company of Marie FitzSimmons and Rosie Price. It did not work out quite as planned but we had a very good time. We started out by visiting the Fleming Collection (See here) which is not far from the Royal Academy. This is a gallery devoted to Scottish artists and there was a special exhibition devoted to James Morrison. He is very talented and the landscapes which were dominated by sky were exceptional. No I have never heard of him before and it was only Rosie's acute eye which spotted that this would be worth visiting.  Then we went to the Manet exhibition at teh Royal Academy. Not well hung. There were two enormous rooms with one picture in eahc and lots of smaller rooms with too many pictures in them so you could not get through teh crowds. Also, although he painted the faces in detail, he gave up elsewhere and the hands were just blobs and blotches. Disappointing. Standing around afterwards, Marie said, 'Well are we going to see the other exhibition?' None  of us had heard of George Bellow but, game for anything, we went up to the RA's Sackler Gallery. American1882 to 1925 and a native of New York. There were lots of paintings of New York from prize fights to longshoremen standing around in the cold waiting for work and portraits. Oh the portraits. There is a beauty of his daughter (about 8) with her grandmother and great aunt. And the hands are the hands of two old ladies who have scrubbed their floors for a lifetime.

 

So two excellent exhibitions we did not intend to visit and we were happy. Rosie and I then went to a lecture about Japanese paper and bought books there. Then got on a very crowded train and returned home with very tired feet.

A Project in 24 hours!!

On Thursday, I had finished the weavings for the set of Castlemorton Common  and they are pinned up on the design board. I have added some very small flowers to the Spring one but am waiting until next Thursday when my sister, Dorothy, is here for a week. She is bringing some colours of Permaset for stencilling on fabric which I have not got and I will do the stencilling then. Besides Dorothy is good at telling when an idea will work and when it won't.

 

Well, the Megado was sitting there with the ghost warp still functional. I really need to weave samples for the Complex Weavers Fine Threads Study Group but I was still mulling over possible projects to weave.

 

The weaving class improvers are all doing Double Weave in lots of different projects. When I discussed things with the other tutor, Rosie Price, we decided to set them all the same project in double weave  to be done entirely by themselves. The project was to weave a tubular bag, that is, weave a tube where, after an inch or two, you swop the back and front cloths to make a base for the bag. The sting is that it has to have a striped warp and the stripes must be quite different on front and back. I had been feeling slightly guilty because I had never actually done this. So ghost warp threaded on four shafts? What could be better? I put on enough warp for two bags. The photo shows both bags on both sides before cutting up. What I have done is wevae them head to head with eight inches of weaving between them which is two separate cloths. The idea is to cut each of these cloths on the colour change line and then one side can have an inch turned in (probably using bias binding) and the other side turns into a closure flap. The rest of the warp has been woven with a nice pale blue boucle cotton (not in the photo) which I intend to cut up for handles. The timetable was Thursday evening, wind two warps, resley ghost warp, separate the ghost warps into Shafts 1+3 and 2+4 using cross sticks, tie one of the warps on to the lower set of ghost threads. Friday morning, tie on other warp to top set of threads and wind on warp. Tie on, weave two inches, take it all out and resley at 15 epi. This worked. Weave happily (one shuttle = happiness after five shuttles simultaneously). Finish by 5 pm. Put Fraystop on various places and cut off.   The yarn is all bits and pieces from the stash as I am having a major stash assault.

 

And what has made me very cheerful is deciding that the moment in life has come to weave some donsu. Not purple though but sage green in the warp. Last night I spent some time checking the drafts I have created and even more time trying to find enough 90/2 silk in the stash. I have a choice of colours, bright red, various shades of grey, white and the sage green. I have a huge range of colours but I need enough yarn  to put 10 metres, 24 inches wide on as warp and i had enough of all of these. So the Megado has been dusted (see - dusting does happen in this house) and this afternoon, I will move the warping wheel into place. I am so excited. It is a long time since I set about a project of this magnitude. I bought some Japanese gold paper thread some years ago and might even try it out!!