New fiber skills

I went to India for 3 weeks to mostly visit family although we did a couple of days of sightseeing also. More on the sightseeing later.

First of all, the scarves and towels I made were received very favorably. I was surprised to some extent because knitted gifts were received well by some but not with this level of enthusiasm. I think it is due to the fact that there is limited use for knitted items in hot Chennai.

I generally just visit when I go to India. I don't have a long shopping list any more. I used to, because everything was not available here. But now I can get most things here. I wanted to buy some stretchy sari blouses, a never-ending quest. I want colors I can wear with my classic Kanchipuram silk saris so I want the traditional colors. Well, they never have them. They have more 'exotic' colors. That is great when I want to match a new sari but not so great when I want ones that will go with a variety of the saris I already own. So each time I buy one or two that I think will match. This time I got a dark blue. I bought an orange to match a new sari and a few for my sister.

I also used to buy a Christmas gift for my hair stylist. She is more of a friend than a hair stylist as I have been going there for more than 30 years. But these days, I make her a gift so there is no need to buy. I buy a gift for her when I travel outside India but I've already bought her a lot of the things that I think are nice gifts from India.

This time I had cotton punis on my shopping list as a major item. I spent a whole morning googling and calling stores where I thought they would have them. No one in Chennai had them or even seemed to know what they were. Then a Ravelry friend from Kolkata told me she got them from a local seller who travels to Wardha in the state of Maharashtra to buy them. The Gandhi Sevagram Ashram there makes and sells them. But there is no online shop. However, she generously sent me some by courier. What a lovely gift!

They come in 100 g bundles wrapped in newspaper.

After my return, I started spinning cotton on my new-to-me Bosworth charkha. I bought this last summer from another Raveler.  She included some easy-to-spin colored cotton sliver so I started with that. That is my first new skill. It is interesting. I have thread that varies from very fine to not-so-fine and I need to decide what degree I want and then produce it consistently. I've spun 1 spindle full.

I also started working on the Navajo rug I started in the class at Rhinebeck. Navajo weaving is very different from tapestry weaving, which it resembles. The technique interlaces the weft threads every other row so the rug is nice and tightly woven. This took me a bit of time to master. Fortunately, I had video taped the instructor when she demonstrated key techniques. Going back and watching that, trying it out, watching again, watching other Navajo weavers weave, etc. finally made it click. I am doing pretty well given I am designing on the fly as the Navajos do. It means I have to backtrack some times and of course, I have to unweave when I make a mistake - for example, I didn't cover a warp thread for 2-3 rows and had to go back.

I have finished the design of the blocks and done a stripe to delineate it from the next design. I am not making this symmetric as I don't want to have to manage the height of each piece. The warp has to be completely woven and it is tightly packed in. I am just going to do another pattern on the other side and end with stripes.

There are two sheds. The top heddle is the dowel on the top that is threaded through every other warp thread. Then there is the pull heddle that is hanging below it. On every pick, you thread something through one of the two sheds and then that holds the shed open to do the weave. I was using a pick up stick but now that is too wide so I am using a fat knitting needle. I will go down to a smaller one in a bit and then eventually one has to remove both dowels and weave using a needle. I am beating with a metal hair pick, some dog combs, and occasionally I put the pickups stick in and press down with it to make sure I have a horizontal edge.

On the non-new skill area, I knitted a hat and undid and reknit it when I was in India. I wanted to make a pair of fingerless mitts to match but I ran out of yarn. I undid the hat and ripped out an inch worth of yarn and reknit the crown. But that still wasn't enough for the thumbs. I found some red yarn, slightly thicker, and I will finish the mitts with that.

Before I cut an inch off the length.

After the re-knitting.

I also started another pair of fingerless mitts. They are still in progress and I don't have a photo.

I plied the red yarn I spun before I left. This was the last of my Tour de Fleece projects from last year. I am very happy with the yarn. That is the bobbin of plied yarn on top. I am now spinning the gradient on the bottom. I will weave a shawl with the two together after spinning. I have 560 yds of the solid red - it was 8 oz of fiber. I have 8 oz of gradient. Right now I am thinking of the solid red for the warp and the gradient for the weft. I'll spin each gradient braid separately and ply them together.

As you remember, the solid red was actually spun by holding a cool red and a warm red together. I am quite pleased at the result. It has a lot of liveliness in color and the yarn is very bouncy. One braid was Polwarth/silk and the other was superwash merino/alpaca/nylon/Tussah. I was afraid about how it would react when I finished it. I was gentle and I will be gentle when I finish the weaving. I don't want differential shrinkage where the non-superwash wool shrinks and the rest doesn't. The gradients are merino/silk so will behave like the Polwarth/silk. Note to Self: read the fiber content before you put fibers together.

I also received some lovely cotton yarn for weaving from another Raveler friend in Chennai.

There are about 250 g of each color so 1 kg in total (2.2 lbs)

She and I went to Shuttles and Needles in Chennai, which is a fabulous store. They are dealers for Ashford and Saori and have looms set up to weave and spinning wheels and spindles as well as knitting supplies. I spun a little on one of the Ashford spindles when I was there and bought one with some fiber for my sister-in-law who was fascinated by both my weaving and my search for punis. Unfortunately, I only went there two days before I left so she had 1 day worth of teaching. Now we are trying it using WhatsApp.

I also boiled the marigold flowers I had been freezing over the summer. I simmered the flowers for 1 hour on day. Let it cool and then simmered again for another hour the next day. Strained out the flowers on the third day. I put a white skein into it and simmered for 30 mins and let the yarn cool in the dye pot overnight. There was still dye left so I added two more skeins to over dye them. I didn't mordant as the recommendation in Jenny Dean's Wild Color was to use alum sulfate on protein fibers and I only had alum acetate. I have the original edition.

I think the color would have been more intense if I had used a mordant. But I am happy with the results. There was more dye in the pot but I discarded it as I didn't have any other fiber that was ready to dye.

 
This was the pure white skein. The next two were overdyed and are slightly muted from the originals, which I thought were too bright.

Overdyed:

Original:

Overdyed:

Original:

And that is it. I am really enjoying all this. I have my next weave planned but will not start till the Navajo rug is done. It is going to use up a bunch of leftover yarns.

Dyeing cotton naturally workshop at Rhinebeck

I took a cotton dyeing class with Jane Woodhouse on the Thursday before Rhinebeck. I had done no natural dyeing except for indigo so I was very excited to get into this class. Jane's classes fill up fast.

When we arrived, we were divided into teams. Each team had two people and I lucked out in that I had a very efficient and complementary partner. The class involves making sample skeins from many different natural dyes - from the lovely purples of logwood to the browns of pomegranate. Each team was given a dye. Most of the dyes were powders but the osage orange was a liquid. We got madder root which interested me but my partner didn't like the color. She loves bright colors and was hoping for logwood or cochineal. Oh well.

We had to make 6 sample skeins with the dye. The first set of three was to dye skeins that had been mordanted with alum acetate. This is a bit different from the alum sulphate that is readily available for pickling and other uses. The skeins had been scoured and mordanted before class. The second set of three skeins was to dye skeins that also had been mordanted with a tannin. There are many tannins and they all leave the fiber a brown color. Tannins are a dye and a mordant. Pomegranate, for example, is both a dye and a mordant.

We briefly soaked the skeins in water because they were getting a little dry. They need to be damp to dye properly. We had to weigh out the dye stuff, mix it in a little very hot water, and then add a specific amount of warm water and the fiber to the dye solution. We mixed everything up in mason jars and then set our first set of dye pots simmering in a water bath. Another very important task was to label each jar with a number that identified it on a master list of the samples. Otherwise the end of the day would have been chaotic!

After the dye pots had been heated to 180F and held there for 30 mins. we carefully lifted them out and set them on the grass to cool. We were in a tent and it was warm so we expanded out into the area surrounding the tent. You can see the thermometer in the dye jar above. The jars were simmered in a water bath in canning kettles. These photos show the sets of three.

Once our first set of three was in the water bath, we did the same thing for the second set of three samples. The reason for the sets of three was that each dye stuff was going to yield a sample of its natural color, then one modified with iron (ferrous sulphate) and one that would be over-dyed with indigo.

We

Here we are adding the ferrous sulphate and stirring. Iron dulls the color but sometimes that is what you want. Once the jars had cooled somewhat, we removed the skeins, rinsed them and hung them up to dry. Fortunately, there is a nice fence next to the tent which Jane uses every year as a drying rack. I've admired the skeins in past years.

Our tannin mordanted skeins went in next into the water bath. Then we did a couple of things in parallel. Jane had built an indigo dye pot but it needed to be refreshed and checked so she went off to do that. The rest of us started on the third set of samples. 

The third set had to do with dyeing with stock solutions. Unlike synthetic dyes, natural dyestuffs do not have a fixed amount to yield a 1% stock solution. The dye manufacturer will provide a guide on each jar based on its strength. Jane had given us some combinations to make to create other colors that weren't possible with one single dye. We created the stock solutions, which didn't use all the dyes that we had used earlier. They used a subset. Then we carefully measured out the correct amounts of the stock solution for each color using syringes. These were added to mason jars (again labeled with the number of the formula) and then we put one each of the two mordanted skeins. One was the alum only and the other was the tannin+alum.

Once these were simmering in the water bath, we started dyeing our earlier samples in the indigo dye bath. It was interesting to see that the tannin samples barely picked up the indigo. Tannins are acid and indigo likes an alkaline environment to dye fiber.

One result of doing this in a single day class was that we didn't get the full depth of color. Almost all dyes take a while to absorb as the dye bath cools down and we should have really left the skeins in overnight to get the maximum color. Similarly, indigo does best with multiple dips with drying and oxidizing time between dips. We did a couple of dips for some of the samples but most got just one dip in the indigo. 

Once our skeins were mostly dry, we cut them into pieces and labeled them with the number. This is where my partner and I collaborated brilliantly. We got ours done and then helped other teams who were slower. By this time, the class was tired and the whole process of creating the individual samples and labeling them and finally picking up a set of them created some frustration and flouncing.

These were the tables with the samples laid out. We each had to pick up one piece from each skein. I decided to wait till everyone was done as there was a huge crush around the table. As a result, it was almost dark by the time we were done and I am missing 1 or 2 samples. 

When I got home, I just laid out the samples to finish drying as some of them were still damp. A couple of weeks later I got some cardstock and punched holes in it, and wrote down all the numbers of the dyes and combinations we created. I then attached each skein to its number on the card.

I have 3 sheets of card that look like this. But at least everything is organized and I can look up any sample and its constituent formula easily.

All in all a really educational day. I realized that natural dyes are not that different from synthetic dyes except that there is no guarantee on the exact color. The mineral content of your water makes a difference as well as the strength of the dye stuff. We used manufactured dye powders/liquids in this class and at least there, the manufacturer has tested the strength and given us an indicator as to that. When one dyes with natural substances from one's garden or kitchen, there is even more variability in the color. 

I collected marigold and black eyed susan blooms from the garden this summer and they are in the freezer along with some pomegranate skins. I also have some dye plants called pernilla that we weeded out of the dye garden at the fairgrounds. It grows everywhere and we pulled it out from where it didn't belong. I plan to simmer them and use them to dye wool this winter. It should be an interesting experiment.