Cashmere corduroy

Starting with a ground cloth made of 2/60 silk made of about 10 different shades of green and beige, I experimented with some pile techniques: corduroy with ribs of cashmere and merino.

I bought surgical scissors with which to cut the loops open. Instead of cutting the loops under tension on the loom, I cut them after I had removed the samples from the loom. The cut pile looks like this: 

The loops are made from 6 strands of 2/28 cashmere in various colours. I mixed the colours as I went to achieve an interesting gradient. You can also see the strand of 2/16 silk in hand-dyed variegated teal, which I interspersed with the pile bundles. I will post another picture after wet finishing, when the bundles turn into rows of fluffy topiary. 

Green Logcabin

There are few pleasures greater than weaving with yarn I have dyed myself. I bought a few kilograms of silk-merino, silk-alpaca, silk--merino-cashmere from the Chester Wool Company, and then dyed it using acid dyes in various shades of green. I mix most of my colours on the skeins themselves using a splashing technique that is practical only because I do it outdoors. 

Using my old Harrisville Designs 22" loom that crossed the ocean to join me in Scotland, I warped with alternating colours to make a series of log cabin experiments. This structure yields a colour-and-weave effect that results in micro-stripes in two directions. I like the structure because it animates the surface with coloured pixels that are optically mixed from a distance, as these two images show:

In another sample, I like the visual interest that my unevenly dyed weft creates:

To bring out the most dramatic features of the colour-and-weave effect, one has to throw two shuttles, first light, then dark, then light, then dark, etc., in what's called a pick-and-pick. The resulting cloth has contrasting stripes, with horizontal and vertical ones alternating:

The final experiment on this warp involved a black cashmere weft in a twill. This resulted in an optically charged surface and a cloth with lovely drape:

New hand-spun yarns

Faith and Alan have made me a new batch of yarn--4 delicious skeins--for some projects I'm dreaming up. Here's what they made:

1.     Approx. 100gms, 35 yds.  Merino thick and thin coils, shells, halos and spirals, with Kate’s hand dyed silk yarn as core and knops.

2.   Approx. 110gms, 25 yds. Merino thick and thin coils, shells and spirals, with Kate’s hand dyed silk yarn as core and knops.

3.   Approx. 115gms, 26 yds. Merino thick and thin coils, shells and spirals, with core/knops of commercial, filigree crochet cotton blend.

4.   Approx. 65gms, 15yds. First clippings of local Romney sheep (we saw these born the previous year). Spun as a lock yarn and plied with a thin hand spun blend of local wool, merino, hand dyed silk and mohair.

I love these yarns! They have changed the name of their small company to Yarns From the Bolt Hole, which has a good ring to it.

There's nothing more pleasurable than warping the loom in hand-dyed silk. Using the warping wheel, I put on a longish warp of the 2/16 silk that I dyed over the course of the last year. As the photo shows, I used gradual colour shifts to move from the most intense colour at the edges and the brightest near the middle, in order to create luminosity.

I warped the full width of the 60-inch sectional beam. (Solveig at Ulla Cyrus made me this beam last year and DHL'd it to me. It has a simple, ingenious structure and smells of Swedish pine.)

I'm one of those people who loves threading the loom. I do this in total silence and with complete concentration. Threading takes quite a long time, but that's ok, because the time passes unnoticed, as the task requires total absorption.

I threaded it in blocks on 6 shafts, without counting or measuring anything, but with the vague goal of making honeycomb. Here is how some of the objects turned out:

And some details:

As you can see, I used some of the Knitting Hamster yarns to achieve dramatic lumps and curves. Here is some of their yarn, before the shed munched it up:

I wove these tapestries upside-down, with only a view of a few inches of fabric at a time. Here it is on the loom:

For another experiment with the same warp, I used many strands of 2/60 silk in the weft, separated by walls of dark wool. I loved the way the long floats felt.

Here's the finished object and two details:

Printed resist in Bhuj

At a community near Bhuj (India), artists print fabric with several techniques. They use blocks carved in teak wood to stamp tessellated designs onto cotton yardage. Their workshop has hundreds of these blocks:

They begin with an outline stamp and continue with an infill stamp. Groups of carved blocks must therefore be coordinated; they form sets.

Men who do the work each do so with their own regularised motion, some one-handed, others with two hands. This man beat the handle of the stamp with each hand, making a regular percussion sound.

Other steps involve throwing the cloth in an indigo bath and then raising it back into the air to oxidise.  Oxidation, rather than time in the dye bath, determines the strength of the colour. Rinsing involves wild violent movements atop a rebar-and-concrete fountain.

Fabric dries in a field stained black and blue.

More Knitting Hamster yarns

Faith and Alan Stone produced even more delicious yarns. The one with the wire core is for me. The others they are selling. I hope the person who buys them is able to do them justice.

This is one of Alan's creations, with coils and mohair. Here's a detail.

This is the one they made for me, built around a wire armature:

The problem is that it's so lovely, with the silk flowers and baubles, that it's difficult to imagine how weaving it up would improve it. Here's a detail:

Knitting Hamster yarns

I have been collaborating with a spinning couple, Faith and Alan Stone, aka the Knitting Hamster (theknittinghamster@gmail.com) to develop some new yarns. Most recently, I dyed some 2/16 silk in bold colours and mailed it to them to use as a core. Around this core they spun their own hand-dyed merino tops. What they came up with is magical:

This is their green merino and local wool spun around my pink and black dip-dyed silk.  Here's a detail:

Then they did a bouclé merino around my purple silk core:

And a detail:

My favourite is one they call 'wild flowers'. Here, they made flowers with some of the 2/16 silk, and incorporated those into the concoction:

 and a detail:

Hat's off to the Knitting Hamster. It will be someone else's task to take these materials to the next stage of their development. Any knitters or weavers out there who want to try?