On a Perfect Summer Day

it's perfect enough weather for haying

an old zinc lime vat about to be refreshed

warming a portion of the vat liquid

reducing a new stock solution

the healthy flower on the top of our copperas vat

dough made for rice paste resist

transferring the cooked dough to the suribachi

finished rice paste

paste applied to a muslin sample using a stencil

Zoe up in the rafters where the resist samples are drying

dessert at lunch today

On a perfect summer day this week, Zoe and I worked on refreshing a couple of old indigo vats so we could finish our preparations for the Indigo Dye Intensive. Kate was also setting up a few esoteric fermentation indigo vats outdoors, one of which smelled REALLY interesting (the Saxon's Vat, I think it was - she left the fleece in it a little overlong and it had turned to pure funk).

They were haying the fields at the top of the hill when I arrived at the barn. It was hot and sunny at 9am. We started right in on a few-month-old zinc lime vat by skimming the crystalline calcium crust off the surface, and then removing a third of the vat liquid for reheating, while we made up and reduced a new stock solution. Then we added the stock to a re-warmed vat, stirred gently, and allowed it to sit overnight for slow reduction of the whole vat.

Meanwhile we checked the copperas vat, and it seemed as if it still had plenty of indigo in it, so we just gave it a thorough stirring and let it sit for the night, just to refresh the action of the chemicals in the vat. The flower still looked really shiny, foamy, and healthy, so we figured we were on the right track, and I had still been getting strong color from it on small piece good and skeins.

Then we turned our attention to making up a rice resist paste. First we sifted mochiko (sweet rice flour) and komon nuka (rice bran flour) together, and then Zoe slowly added water while I worked it thoroughly into the flours to make a paste the consistency of wet pastry dough. Then we put the dough in a small bowl with barely enough water to cover it and nuked it in the microwave until it was cooked through. The next step was to transfer the solid portion of the dough to a suribachi and to thoroughly grind it into a silky smooth paste, which when finished, we stored in a small bowl, covering the surface of the paste with plastic wrap like you would to keep a skin from forming on pudding.

Then we made a rough stencil out of cardboard and using a small squeegee, ran the paste through the stencil onto a cloth sample and hung it up to dry for a few days.

At lunch Zoe showed us how to make delicious Belgian/Danish yummies with crusty bread spread with fresh local ricotta, sprinkled with sacred evaporated cane juice, and topped with as many fresh red currants as you can pile onto the top of it. We ate a lot of that! And then went back in and played with indigo some more...

See you at the Indigo class. We are going to have some fun!

Shibori Es Zuma!

ancient japanese shibori on hemp

contemporary shibori on silk

I'm getting things ready for the shibori segment of the Indigo Dye Intensive to be held at the end of the month. Last summer I tie-dyed some simple things, 60's hippie style, in the indigo vat, and they're pretty cool. But I got curious and inspired to investigate further, so now I find myself stitching up sample pieces of the six kinds, an of traditional japanese patterns we'll be trying at the indigo weekend.

We'll be setting up and working with many different kinds of indigo vats, doing resist paste block printing and discharge printing on cloth, and putting together several classic examples of non-tool-intensive shibori tie and stitch resists.

I can't wait.

People Around the Barn These Days

Karen builds a warp for a ruana

Zoe has been here doing research on resist pastes 

Kate has been busy this month, fielding many requests for fabric

Lynnette has been re-habbing from her broken arm in March

Jackie finished a blanket and is taking the summer off to travel

Pat warped for a summer blanket

Sandra has been weaving a very long scarf in a complicated pattern

Susan is weaving a summer blanket

Stevie is starting to weave some upholstery fabric

Lisa was here from Texas to work on countermarche linen

June was a busy month at the barn, with an increase in commissioned work for Eaton Hill Textile Works and many new and returning students walking through our doors. Our crew of regular local students is still going strong, although in the summer many of us take nice days off to work in our gardens or go away for fun, because it's easier to do that in the summer than when the snow is on the ground.

Kate has been very busy fielding the many inquiries and requests for the new embossed upholstery fabric produced by her business Eaton Hill, while still juggling a full plate of intermediate and advanced teaching, and managing a queue of other production dye and fabric jobs.

Karen Sutherland wound up a few-month-long stint with us with a commissioned project. She spun all the wool yarn, which we dyed black, and then she wove a beautiful ruana with alternating stripes of herringbone twill and basketweave. She's applying for a Vermont Folklife grant to come and work with us for a longer stretch.

Zoe has been working part-time on researching resist pastes for indigo block printing, and will be one of the presenters at the Indigo Dye Intensive later in July. She's also been processing a mountain of fleece up in Kate's barn.

Lynnette broke her arm in late March and after a period of time out of the weaving action is back again at the loom, getting her strength, motion, and flexibility back with increasingly more complex weaving. Meanwhile, her chickens have been cranking out the best eggs on the planet, and her garden strawberries have been fabulous additions to our summer lunches at the barn.

Jackie finished up a beautiful blanket for her daughter as a wedding gift, and is taking the summer off from weaving at the barn to travel and to take the knowledge and experience she's been accumulating here and put it to work on her own loom at home. Before she left she shared a lot of wonderful vegetable seedlings with all of us...she has a big garden and grows wonderful vegetables all season long.

Pat wound a warp for a summer blanket in June and then took some time off to travel and visit family. She'll be returning to weave that in July.

Sandra has been weaving a very lovely and complex pattern in fine wool...it was meant to be a scarf, but it's going to be a very long thin scarf now, as she just continues to weave off all that yardage. I'm sure it will be just gorgeous doubled up and wrapped around a neck multiple times...a new take on the idea.

Susan has been weaving a summer blanket, and she's able to spend more time working on it since she left her job in the doctor's office. It's really great to have you around more often, Susan!

Stevie has started to weave some of the upholstery fabric jobs for Eaton Hill, and her huge garden thrives over in Chittenden County. She'll be taking time this summer to travel as well.

Lisa Hardaway was here from Texas for a week, learning our warping techniques and how to set up a countermarche tie-up, as she has an 8-harness Cranbrook at home that she wants to be able to work fancy patterns on. She'll be back in early August for another week of rug weaving.

The weather has been typically Juney around here...which means pretty rainy, some hot days sprinkled here and there, but mostly on the cool side. Great for the gardens, but we sometimes get a little antsy, waiting for the real summer weather, I think because we live in winter so much of the year!

The Cotton and Linen Dye Workshop

we had great weather for the most part

Barb weighs mordants while Tomi skeins up some cotton

cutch vat underway with its chrome dip

yarn to overdye in the indigo vat

demonstrating the setup of the indigo vat

Sylvia wringing out skeins

black walnut extract and vinegar in the iron kettle

overdyeing greens in the big indigo vat

we set up a smaller indigo vat for blues 

Barb preparing yarrow for dyeing

the iron kettle on the morning of Day 2

copper sulfate and logwood mixtures

yarrow ready to boil

Tomi checking skeins after the first stage of amish logwood purple

cutch and yarrow vats - Day 2

Sylvia working skeins through the osage vat

last stage of amish logwood purple

end of Day 2 - making up the sample books

cotton and linen samples drying at the end of Day 2

We had a great time dyeing yarn for twenty different colors during our annual Natural Dye Workshop for Cotton and Linen. Kate and I premordanted the samples that required a three-day alum-tannin-alum treatment to help save time, so after getting everyone's yarn skeins labeled and scoured, we set to work making up the remaining alum and tannin mordants for the simpler processes that could well be completed in two days.

Each student focused on preparing three or four dyes, from start to finish, although there was time during the day to check in on what other people were doing. Just a quick run-down of the dyes we worked with over the weekend:

Egyptian Purple

Amish Logwood Purple

Iron Buff

Black Walnut

Cutch Brown

Jet Black

Osage Orange

Brazilwood

Cochineal

Madder

Yarrow

Cinnamon

Madder Orange

Copperas Indigo Vat

Thiox Indigo Vat

Prussian Blue

Saxon's Green

Fustic Green

Olive Green

Many of these receipts call for an elaborate, multi-step procedure of mordanting, dyeing, fixing, airing, more mordanting, and overdyeing until they are complete. Logwood Purple and Jet Black are great examples of this; to obtain the rich deep traditional purple, the fiber is first mordanted with tannin overnight. The next day it is worked in the logwood vat, then aired, then alum and copper sulfate are added to the vat and the fiber is worked again, more logwood is added, then it is aired and rinsed out. It's pretty amazing to see the initial vibrant stages of deep orange turn into vivid purple. The Jet Black is similar and involves tannin, lime water, copperas, copper sulfate, logwood, fustic, madder, washing soda, and more copperas in a very precise sequence. I've never seen it a rich black, but it did go a very nice charcoal grey this year, which is better than I've seen it before.

We dye samples of cotton and linen yarn in each dye, so that each participant can have a record of each color and how it takes up with both fibers. In addition, students can bring some of their own yarn or cloth to experiment with, so they have some great natural dyed yarn to take home for a project.

By the end of the weekend we have a rainbow of lovely, subtle yarns hanging out on the line to dry in the sun and breeze. After clean-up everyone sits with the now-dried yarn samples and makes up a beautiful sample book to take home, which is a great review of the weekend's work, and a chance to really fix in one's mind just what all the colors look like.

It was a great class this year, with ample participation to make dyeing such a wide range of colors relatively easy. This course is a great general overview of the traditional receipts for natural dyeing. At the request of several participants, we are considering offering some more intensive work with mordanting and with single colors, so that each person has the opportunity to experience the full process. We may try this as more weekend courses or as an ongoing study group. We'll keep you posted as this develops.

A Week of Checked Linen Weaving

setting up for the weeks' projects

Kate introduces Suzi to a barn loom

beaming on Suzi's project

Suzi threading her linen towelling

Sylvia and Kate enjoying a threading conundrum

Sylvia threads her linen towelling

Suzi's indigo and white linen check

Suzi weaving

detail of Suzi's linen

detail of Sylvia's lovely cutch and silvery grey linen

It's been a busy last few weeks around here...getting prepared for our first dye workshop of the summer, juggling the schedule to accommodate new work and new students...and in the midst of all that we had two students here for a week to learn some more advanced techniques in weaving checked linens. Sylvia returned from her home in Massachusetts, and Suzi came all the way from a small town in the center of Georgia.

Checked linen is pretty interesting because it gives one the opportunity to practice weaving with linen in a fairly non-intimidating way, if one has never worked with it before. Most towelling is not particularly wide, so it is possible to learn about the particulars of warping and beaming on and weaving without having to deal with a long shuttle throw as well.

The first thing to figure out with weaving a check is the warp sequence, so that you can efficiently build the warp off a skarne of spools and have the pattern of warp stripe build itself on the down and back. The only tricky part of this is remembering to be mindful of which way you turn your hand to make the cross at the beginning of the warp, so everything stays in the correct order! But once you have this sorted out the only critical thing is making sure your tension while warping is even; not too tight and not too loose.

Linen has a remarkable tendency to sag and bag under excessive handling, so when beaming on it is very important to fuss with it as little as possible, something akin to wrapping a gift in fine tissue paper...the less it is smoothed and touched, the better off you'll be in getting your warp on the loom successfully. Once you start correcting things by handling, there seems to be a domino effect of ever-increasing baggy-ness in the warp, which can be very difficult to make right, and can make the entire loom-dressing process much less efficient. Typically, minor inconsistencies in warp tension will naturally be overcome and evened-out once you are threaded and tied-up, so it's really best not to mess with it too much in the beaming on.

Taking some extra time to make sure the threading is correct and the equipment tie-up is tweaked to give you a clean shed on each treadling will go a long way toward making the actual experience of weaving smooth and trouble-free. It can take a period of adjustment to figure out just how one needs to throw the shuttle in order not to break threads, but I have found that a light touch and a relaxed awareness is key. The selvedges seem to take care of themselves, as long as you don't unintentionally tear out an edge by setting the tenterhook too far out.

Sylvia and Suzi's projects were really beautiful, both of them having chosen very traditional colors. It was a delight having both of them add their experience and perspective to our group of weavers for this week and we hope they enjoyed being with all of us as much as we enjoyed having them here.

Sylvia stayed on to participate in the Cotton and Linen Dye Workshop over this last weekend (I'll post about that at the end of this week), and Suzi left to catch her flight back to Georgia on Saturday afternoon. We hope to see them both back here again!