WeFF is happening this weekend!

Sixteen-shaft pinwheel throw, wool and wool blends, woven on my 60" loom.














More fiber fun is coming up this Sunday, at the Weaving and Fiber Festival in Torrance.  The Southern California Handweavers' Guild presents this event annually, with fiber vendors, demonstrations, a finished handmade goods boutique, used weaving equipment and books, fabulous door prizes, a fashion show (2 pm) and more.  Join us Sunday Nov 6, 10 to 4 at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.

Off the Loom

Throw blankets, off the loom and wet-finished.  Going up in my Etsy shop.

Another Dye Day

Yesterday was the third annual Fiber Day I've participated in at the Huntington Library and Gardens.  Weavers and spinners were there demonstrating, as well as us dyers.  The dyeing we do at this event feature dyestuffs from plant materials.  This year I tried dyeing with kamala (Mallotus philippensis) and indigo (Indigofera tinctoria).

Top row, kamala on wool premordanted with (left to right) iron, copper and alum.  Bottom row, left to right, indigo on unmordanted wool, and indigo overdip on the same three kamala-dyed as above.  The indigo was such a strong color it overpowered the yellows, so I got teals instead of the greens I was after, but still pretty.

Late on the Loom

Some stash-busting throw blankets in a color-and-weave star pattern.

3rd Convergence Exhibit

A third piece I submitted to Convergence 2016 was accepted, for the "All-Media" exhibit.  The theme this year is "Mixed Bag".   Here's a detail of my piece L'heure Bleue.  Come to the Handweavers' Guild of America's Convergence 2016 in Milwaukee to see the whole thing in person!

This is the first time I've had a piece in every exhibit; it's pretty exciting.

Weaving Night and Day

Weaving night.  With some twilight, and a little bit of the Golden Hour peeking out in midsummer.

Another Old Friend

Ha, ha - I just realized this is my first-ever post about spinning.  Oh, have I missed spinning - and I didn't even realize it.  I dusted off my spinning wheel the other day.  Literally dusted it off.  The poor thing was pretty filthy.

I had this "art batt" in a pretty green-based palette of mixed fibers (wool, bits of silk and viscose) that spins up into a textured yarn.  I'd spun a bit of it some years back.  I oiled up the wheel and finished up the batt.

I noticed that the batt had become matted in places.  Not too badly; I was able to coax it by opening it up sideways and then predrafting it lengthwise before spinning.  But that matting that occurred just from it being in the plastic bag and moved from one basket or box to another over the years gave me the idea it might felt well also.  So with some of it I made a piece of matching felt.

More of Nature's Colors

Here are the results of last Sunday's dye session for Fiber Arts Day at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens.  These are, from left to right: madder, cabbage (alkaline bath), cabbage (acidic bath), wild lettuce, walnut leaves, nasturtium blossom.  And from top to bottom, the mordants were alum, copper and iron.

The madder came out less orangey than usual.  I'm pleased with these more muted reds.  The cabbage was just to try, for fun; I'm not sure how washfast or lightfast those will turn out to be.  The nasturtium blossoms were a disappointment: despite the beautiful magenta-colored liquid they made, the wool only turned a dull beige.

The most spectacular for me was the walnut. Can you believe this dark, rich brown came from fresh green leaves?  And it is supposed to be its own mordant due to the tannins.  I can't believe I've lived with this walnut tree for 24 years and have never dyed with it.  I'll certainly be doing more with walnut.

Tonag with a Twist

A tonag, I learned recently, is a sort of a Scottish poncho.  Here's my Fraser tartan made up into a poncho-like garment.  This version can be worn asymmetrically for an updated look.  It's really a cozy little thing to wear.

The lacy sprang decoration adds to the eccentricity of the garment.

The Plot Thickens

Here's the twist I'm putting into this weaving.

The tartan as seen through sprang worked into the warp while it's still on the loom.

I am working an inset area of sprang in the tartan cloth.  It goes across the entire width of the warp.  This is basic 1/1 interlinked braided structure.

What on earth is this going to be, you ask?

A Tartan Toast

I'm not a huge fan of tartans, but I am a fan of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books, now being made into a TV series.  In honor of the series entering its second season early next month, I'm weaving a tartan, specifically Fraser of Lovat.  This is in a fine wool at 24 ends per inch and 24 picks per inch for a balanced plain weave rather than the traditional twill, to keep the fabric lightweight.

I'm enjoying the simple interplay of colors.  But as usual I seem to be unable to keep things simple.  So this piece, like a plot in good story, has a twist.  Stay tuned and the twist will be revealed.

My Blues Weaving

Work in progress.  Slit tapestry weave on a floor loom.

Lately I have noticed that my most contented and optimistic moments are those when I am sitting at the loom, weaving. At other times there are the normal doubts and fears, but in those minutes and hours at the loom, everything feels as if it's in the right place and headed in the right direction.

My Blues Palette

After all those dyeing sessions, it's time to weave!  Here are the colors I am now working with.  From top to bottom, Tints, tones, direct modulation, and two levels of tints of the direct modulation series.

Notice in the grayscale version that the tints are reducing the saturation by lightening the value of the blue, while the tones are reducing it while leaving the value constant.  The direct modulation is almost constant value as well.  (Is it my imagination, or does it seem to be slightly darker in the middle of that series?)

One thing I did not include was a gradation of the blue to black by adding increasing amounts of  black (or rather a very dark gray, since I was dyeing white yarn).  So the darkest value is also the value of my most saturated blue.

Saturation studies continued - direct modulation

A third (and to me the most interesting) way to make a color less intense (less saturated) is by direct modulation.  Direct modulation is adding amounts of the direct complement of the original hue.  The direct complement is the hue directly opposite on the color wheel.  In this case my original hue is blue, and its direct complement is an orange.  In a gradation from 100% blue, through 50/50, to 100% orange at the other end of a series, the colors will be less saturated toward the middle of the series, and if they are true complements there should be a point at which there are "equal" amounts of red, yellow and blue, forming gray - a completely neutral, unsaturated color.

For my first direct modulation dye session, I guess I was thinking of orange as the color of an orange, that is, of the skin of an orange.  Well, it turns out that is more of a golden color.  So when I mixed this color with my blue, there was no point at which I got anywhere near a gray.  Instead I got a nice selection of greens.  There was never enough red in my orange to neutralize the blue and yellow.

For this particular blue, I needed a redder orange, more like a tangerine.  My second trial was more successful.  See the grayish hues in the middle of the series?

I think these more muted colors are so interesting that I did a couple more series using less dye, to get tints of the direct-modulated series.

More saturation - tones

Another way to desaturate a color is by making tones of the color.  Toning a hue down is adding a gray that is the same tonal value (lightness or darkness) of the original hue.






 
To do this with dyes on white yarn, I had to first find a gray that was the same relative value as my saturated color. So I dyed some grays using varying amounts of black dye on the same white yarn.  The grayscale version of the photo show that the blue is lighter than any of my trial grays.

So I tried again.This time I think the next lighter gray (labeled F) fits the best.

Then I used mixtures of this gray and my original blue to create the tones of blue.

Studying Saturation - tints

In our study subgroup of my guild, "Centered on Color & Fiber", this year we are focusing on two qualities of color, saturation and value.  For my exercise in saturation (aka intensity of a color), I have been playing with different ways to desaturate a color, or give it less intensity, when dyeing yarn.

One way is by adding white to the color, or in the case of dyeing, using less dye on white yarn.  Adding white to a color doesn't change its hue, it just makes its value lighter; these lighter colors are called tints of a color.

As I'd remembered from previous dyeing sessions, when you reduce the amount of dye in a linear manner, the darker more saturated colors in a series like this look closer in tonal value to each other than the lighter more pastel tints.

Here's a grayscale version of the same photo; some of the darker colors are hard to tell apart.

The darkest ball of yarn is dyed at a depth of shade (DOS) of 1.0.  This means that for every gram of fiber (yarn), I used 1 ml of a 1% dye solution.  You can use more dye and get even more saturated color, I guess until all the places on the fiber that can accept the dye are taken.  I didn't push that limit.  I'm just defining the DOS 1.0 color as my most saturated blue for this project.

UFOs

You know those UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that sit around for months or years?  I'm sure you have them.  This is one of those.  What is it, you ask?

Since the weather (finally) has cooled off a bit around here, I was thinking my teapot needs a jacket or "cozy".  I had started one from a project in a book some number of years ago, so I dug it out of the basket on the top of the bookcase where it had been collecting dust.

 It's pretty funky-looking.  It's knitted of wool in "short rows" for shaping, and then wet-felted.

It's too big for my teapot so I rolled up the hem.  I decided I really didn't care for the colors.  Too cold-looking for something that should be cozy.

So I overdyed it in golden yellow...

... yeah!  That's more like it.

After dyeing, I felted it a bit more and it fits the circumference of the teapot better, but it's still too tall.  I left the cuff edge out so it would show the unevenness of the edge of the felted fabric.