More Indigo Dyeing

The indigo dyeing on Sunday was a success. I dyed more than a kilo of yarn to the correct depth of colour and also dyed several pieces of cotton. I am keeping the indigo vat until the yarn is all dried and I can sort it into bags for delivery next Saturday. Just in case of shortage, you understand. It went better than the first day because I doubled the size of the dye bath.

I hope to complete any more dyeing needed on Wednesday as I am desperate to finish the wool/silk dyeing and get that warp on the loom. The Megado has been lonely since early December. 

The double weave for the book is going well although I am still searching for a method of printing text on the Tencel surface. The covers for the Morning Glory book are done, glued, pressed and ready. I only need to add the title on the front and sew the spine.

Most of today was taken up with going out to lunch at the Three Choirs Vineyard -  see here. I have to fetch the Community Action van (which has wheelchair access) get Michael into it (not painless), drive round Malvern and pick up two friends then drive for 30 minutes to the Vineyard.  And after lunch reverse all this. It was  a dank damp day with no sunshine but the vineyard itself looked lovely. They are all neatly pruned and the ground is quite hilly. The vines are all lined up but everyone is different. I wish I had taken some photos. It was a good lunch too.

Transferring Prints to Fabric

At the Bourneville class, I found instructions in a book on how to go from a printed picture to the same on a piece of fabric by way of an Inkjet printer. I tried this morning, taking care to reverse the lettering first. The instructions said 'Print on highclass photo paper, spray the fabric lightly with water, then spray the print (held vertically)  two or three times with water, apply paper to fabric and burnish two or three times'. 

I used Canon Glossy II which appears to be impervious to water. Anyway nothing doing. So I tried Fabbiano Accademia paper - highclass paper but not photo.  If you spray the paper held vertically, all the ink runs down the page so you need to hold it horizontal. It does work - sort of. 

Red is not as good as black printing and black isn't much good anyway. The fabric was just pre-washed off-white cotton. I think this wants more investigation. Use bold lettering? Other fabric?

In between times, I am working on the Morning Glory book.

Preparations are all done for Indigo Dyeing this afternoon.

The photo on the left is a sample for a Double Weave book - hence the interest in getting text onto fabric.

The warp is of two different space dyed Tencels from Just Our Yarns sett at 36epi and the weft is a self colour (blue-green) from the same source. The weave is a 3 and 1 broken twill, making sure that the 3 and 1 is in the opposite hand on the two cloths so that the final result is warp faced on both sides. I did experiment with tabby but the colour of the warp is dulled down a lot. This is a sample with square pages and when I have woven four pages I will cut it off and check it all works. It will be a concertina book. I do have letters I could stamp with but there is too much text for me to be sure of not making a mess anywhere. As the book is continuous, I think this is a mistake. I might stamp the title because that will be shorter and in large letters.  If the worst comes to the worst, I can have Thermofax screens made but that would be expensive. I need to continue exploring this transfer business

Blog Peekers

At the moment I seem more interested in my to-do list than what I have done in the last few days. Partly because a lengthy trip to Worcester Royal on Friday afternoon so that Michael can have his monthly transfusion of Zoladronic Acid has driven previous events out of my mind. I did get to my class on Friday morning and spent the time seeing what happened to the colours of transfer dyes. I was trying to put green leaves and flowers on to a red background but they turned out mauve (see below). So that's put paid to that idea. Annette, the tutor, thinks I would have to applique leaf shapes in dark green cotton to get the effect I want. I have prepared two pieces of red  background stamped with the Paisley pattern wood block so I still have one piece untouched. Some time this weekend I will look for green cotton in the stash.

The most important job today is to survey what has been done in the way of indigo dyeing and work out what needs to be done tomorrow.  And send off the Shuttle to the printer. That's the Kennet Valley Guild Newsletter. It is all done and Michael proofread it on Thursday. I will read it through one last time and email it off. 

The reason for the title is that I discovered last night that the Google has a blog  visitor counter and was a bit flabbergasted by the range - and number - of  visitors. They tell you what country too and provide a map of the world. UK and USA and Canada I can understand but Argentina and India! And a few from Pakistan. I was looking at the summary of a week and I suppose it only takes one person in Pakistan to look up the blog every second day or so to rack up the sort of numbers Pakistan has.  I am flattered in one way but hope they are looking at other (better) people's blogs - Daryl Lancaster, Elizabeth Barton. I particularly like Elizabeth Barton's for her discussions of what an artist is up to.

Morning Glory Title Page

The ink came yesterday and I started generating the final pages for the Morning Glory book. Here is the title page where the Kanji characters in the cartouche say 'Morning Glory'.  This cartouche will also be used on the cover.

It takes me a long time to do all the layering needed in Photoshop. I could finish it today.

We are so taken with this book that we had a great discussion about another book. I want to do a book on the Border ballad  'Sir Patrick Spens' but Michael says he is not competent to do the graphics - not his style. I have been mulling over this for some months and have realised ,as a result of the discussion with Michael, that I see the graphics as being black and white and why not do linocuts? I am thinking about it.

However I did make a suggestion which he is acting on - he will paint one item (flower, leaf, plant) from our garden for each month of the year. I am not sure about the text. Maybe between us, we can find some suitable quotations which would be printed on the opposite page. In 'Morning Glory, a painting and the text are on the same page and a pen and ink drawing on the  opposite page with details of the writer of the text. Yesterday afternoon I went out (in the rain) and and took close up photos of cyclamen (see below) and snowdrops and maple bark. The big leaf in the foreground is about an inch across

I have done a bout of lino-cut printing this morning and am quite pleased with the results.

Indigo Dyeing for Cushions

This is the result of indigo dyeing this afternoon. Cushion weavers were allowed to choose light, medium or dark indigo. The light ones are at the top nearest the camera. There is a very dark one at the lower left - what I call Japanese indigo.

The rest are all medium although there is some variation. When they are dry, I will examine them carefully and possibly overdye some skeins. I still have four not-dyed-at-all skeins but I had no more indigo or spectralite so have sent for fresh supplies. I have kept the indigo bath   and will finish this session off next weekend. 

The different blue at the top but the rear is my own warp, well two of them which are the same as each other but are a lightish mid-blue.

I found it quite difficult to get successive skeins the same shade of blue. The light ones were done at the end of the afternoon when I had got the hang of repeating a colour.

I also dyed two large pieces of cotton by crumpling them and tying up the bundle tightly with string. Both bundles were a bit too large and the pieces have large white patches from the middle of the bundle. I will overdye them but have not decided how. Do I just submerge them and get rid of the white or do I crumple them up differently?

The only other thing of note is that I went to see my GP as my left hand has been troubling me. I expected to be told it was arthritis and take these pain killers, Mrs Foster Not a bit of it. 'Are you quite sure you haven't broken it?' He asked this question at least three times and then organised an X-ray. No pain killers. My sister, Dorothy (a retired GP), put the lid on the day by saying re a possible broken bone, 'Have you thought how you are going to manage Michael if your left hand is in plaster?' Well actually no that had not occurred to me.

I Have Been Good

I am sure everyone knows the day when you set out to do A, find you have to do B first and then that cannot be done until you do C and you wind up scrubbing the kitchen floor or turning out the scullery first. Last week I decided I really needed to start on the indigo dyeing for the Guild exhibit of cushions where the yarn has been natural dyed. Disappearing into the garage for hours on end is not on so I arranged for a carer to come in so Michael would be looked after. This is happening tomorrow afternoon (Monday). I checked I had enough chemicals last Wednesday - just in case I needed to get some but I didn't. All was well on that front.

The problem started on Saturday (yesterday) night. I decided I should wind my own warp and dye it in one go. That would allow me to work out what weight of yarn everyone required.  So I looked up my EXCEL spreadsheet and it said '? What epi?'And then I remembered. I did a wrapping with this yarn and it came out at 18 ends per inch which means 9 epi for tabby. But I also weighed a length of 10 metres very accurately and worked out the km/kg (yds per pound) and that pointed to a sett of 16 epi. This was really too different to use either. So late last night a decision was made that, since the Voyager was the only free loom, I would do a sample on that today. I got up at 6 am and had the weaving started at 0930 (time out was taken to give Michael pills and breakfast and fetch the paper). I sleyed up at 12 epi quite prepared to resley. But 12 epi is perfect!!! So I have been good. This will enable me to work out weights of yarn much more accurately.

Yesterday at the weaving class, I had a spare five minutes and chose the drafts from Carol Strickler's book  to use for my cushions. I chose a threading from which four different patterns can be  woven which I then changed a lot. So I have woven samples of each draft. The photo above shows, at the left, a weft which is exactly as the warp yarn and this has given me the data of  12 epi. I used up the rest of the warp with samples of each of the four different drafts. The width is 230 mm which is about two fifths of the final width.  I will change the layout of the stripes in the final version. I must wash this now and get a handle on the shrinkage.

Michael looked at the scanned paintings of morning glories, retouched one and replaced another. He also painted some twining morning glories on the title page.  I spent some time creating an end paper, see below.

I have decided to change the layout on each page. As I have had to order some printer ink for the Inkjet which will not be here until at least Wednesday, I have put both books aside till the end of next week. But next weekend should see a flurry of activity on this front as I print and assemble both books. There will only be 'In the Event' but I might make 10 of the Morning Glory to give away as presents. In any case I need to concentrate on the indigo dyeing immediately.

Morning Glory Sample Page

This is a page from the Morning Glory book. All looking very nice but not if coloured green. The paintings were scanned in and two of the pictures look very odd in colour. This one is okay. Before attempting to do any Photoshop treatment, I intend to print all the pages out on the final paper and on the Inkjet. Definitely tomorrow. 

I have been to the Creative Textiles class and spent the time designing the decoration on a haori (Japanese workman's jacket). I then drove to my daughter in Leamington Spa and had lunch and admired her new bathroom. Visited the local Indian sweetshop and brought home too much. Drove home in time to receive Michael back from the day hospice. Later went out to do a massive shop and buy two new dustbins.

It was a good day!!