Natural Dye Workshop

I was back at the Retreat Center on Tuesday for the first day of a natural dye workshop.  The same workshop was offered on back-to-back days because the instructor, Francisco Bautista of the Portland Handweavers Guild, wanted to keep the class size down to ten a session.

These are skeins he brought for demonstration.

He is a third generation weaver/dyer from Oaxaca Mexico, dating back to when only men were weavers and women worked in the kitchens, though he says that has changed now.  He has woven since he was eight and his wife began weaving when she was 14. This cochineal rug is one of the sample rugs he brought.  

 He brought bins of dye stuff but we only had time for yellow onion skins, marigolds, cochineal and black walnut which he is pulling apart here.

Everything went into the pot, walnuts, stems and leaves.  He used a gallon of water to cover these plants for four ounces of wool.  He didn't premordant for this or cochineal and sometimes he said he will put premordanted and unmordanted yarns into the same dye pot to get different shades for his tapestries.

We did the same with marigolds.  He soaked the yarn for 30 minutes while preparing the next dye bath and he counted cooking time as the dye bath time.  He didn't count the cooking time of the yarn, just the soaking time.  When the dye bath had boiled for 90 minutes he removed it from the heat.  The time the yarn had been in the pot wasn't relevant since they're going to sit together for the next three days.  He calls this method fermentation and says it's the way he learned it from his grandfather. Again, no mordant.

We compared the two yarns at the end of their cooking period.  The marigold yarn is yellow and onion skins made gold.  He doesn't often use mordant, even alum, over concerns of their toxicity.  Nevertheless, he gave us a recipe for mordanting wool: use 15% alum and 5% cream of tarter, and that is percentage is calculated per weight of wool.

For cochineal his mordant is the juice of one lime and 1 ounce of apple cider vinegar for four ounces wool.

To show us how to get purple, he crushed some of the cochineal beads in his palm.

Then he added baking soda and squeezed lime juice into his palm.  That's his recipe, just keep mixing until you like the color.

Our workshop went from 9:30-4:30 and it was crammed full, every minute of it.  We poured the yarn and due liquor with plant material into large baggies for the three-day fermentation process.  To get even color he recommends stirring and turning the yarn three times a day.  Volunteers took these home to babysit.

It was a cold blustery day but we were enthralled by the easy way he approaches natural dyes.  I have always enjoyed the colors but I have never been able to think of a practical way to use the wools. And in spite of owning five books on natural dyes, I have never gotten much of any color besides yellow. Francisco also teaches a class on weaving tapestries on floor looms.  I hope our guild will bring him back for that.  I can see me doing that.

Natural Dye Workshop

The sky yesterday  morning was astounding.

Check out the rainbow remnant on the right.  It was a fabulous morning.  I checked the weather for the day because I was getting ready to leave for a natural dye workshop which, of course, was outdoors.  It was snowing in the mountains and on the pass.  Holy cow!  I dressed accordingly and headed to town for the first day of a two-day workshop.  I blogged about it here for my guild blog.  It's a new blog that we just started this month.  Beryl and I are sharing the writing responsibilities.  The creative and tech end are all hers, because that's the way she rolls :)  

I talked to Marilyn and Nancy about using rabbit brush which is currently in full bloom for a yellow in lieu of the osage orange.  They are very close friends and share a ton of knowledge between them.  They said that rabbit brush color depends on the time of year when you collect the dye stuff.  Early on in the spring would have provided the "national geographic yellow."  Now I would get a gold using alum as the mordant.  At this stage it's so full of tannin that you don't need a mordant.  They suggested I try a "crackle pot" which is a layer of dye stuff, a layer of wool - and repeat.  Cover it with water and cook it for an hour a day, resting it in between times until I get the depth of shade I desire.  Nancy said she just did a crackle pot that she stretched over a week.  Good grief.  I'll think about it.

Just Another Day in Paradise

For the longest time I thought Desert Peach was named for the color of their early spring blossoms,  The name actually comes from the fruit that looks like tiny peaches, which is a little bit of pulp around a large seed.  The birds don't seem to be interested in it, but I've read that Indians made medicinal teas from the leaves and twigs.  So what the heck is the point of the fruit?! 

I finally finished another towel warp this morning.  I got sidetracked by my scarf quest, i.e., obsession.  I'm going to table that for now and get some towels done and uploaded to my Etsy store which is nekkid.  These are washed and cut apart for hemming in the morning.

I'm playing around with cones for my next warp.  I'd like to do another sea-glass theme.  I'm using pictures from Google images but there's a lot of variation.  I haven't decided if I'll go with these yet -  still pondering.

Robin and I went over to Mim's after lunch.  She let us know that the indigo pot that they used last Saturday at the guild meeting still had color.  We jumped on the opportunity.  It looks so green and icky, it's hard to believe blue comes out of it.

You have to be careful to not swish or stir and to remove the skeins slowly so you don't disturb the bath because it's important to not introduce oxygen. The color is faint at first.

The blue comes with exposure to oxygen.  Don't ask.  I don't understand it.  I just follow the instructions.  Robin is holding her skin of merino and Mim is holding my skein of blue-face leicester.  The merino took up the dye much more quickly.

We just kept at it, one skein at a time, taking turns.  More dips in the bath built a deeper blue.  The bath is near exhaustion but we were still able to get some nice color.

These are the things that Mim dyed at the guild meeting on Saturday.

And it's my turn.  I had a pound of handspun skeins that I had spun a couple of years ago and didn't know what to do with. I'm glad I had them because today was their day.

These are my skeins.  I'm not sure yet how I'll use them, but I'm thinking a scarf warp with various blues might be awfully cool.

Robin and I are going back after lunch again tomorrow.  We're going to dye more skeins with what's left of the bath before Mim discards it.  Even light blue will make a nice green when overdyed with rabbitbrush.  We're taking our spinning wheels so we can make more yarn and enjoy this view.  I love the view from Mim's front porch.

But wait.  The day wasn't over.  We've been in the throes of  refinancing our house for two agonizing months.  The mortgage company sent a notary public to our house tonight to sign the closing loan documents.  She had no idea where we lived and said she couldn't believe that this is still called Reno.  I know this county goes all the way to the Oregon border.  I wonder when it stops being Reno.  Anyway, it's done, and the closing is on the date the rate was set to expire.  Talk about under the wire.

Seven Years

Spring is really dragging its heels here. The wind has been blustery and all the rain that I hear about isn't falling here. Nevertheless, the Desert Peach, the harbinger of spring is now in bloom.
It's such a cheerful shrub and very fragrant - a member of the rose family. I took my camera this morning when I walked Buster.
Oddly, the blossoms aren't a uniform shade. Some are this light pink.
Some are this hot pink, and in fact, I used this shade today in one of my desert pond towels. I thought heck yeah. That's a naturally occurring color. Check out the thorns. They are lethal. I have scratches on the my car doors from venturing too close to the side of our driveway too many times. Those bushes are going away this month - soon.
And it's not just Desert Peach, but Bitter-
brush is in bloom at the same time this year. It's another subtle plant but across the brush you see the dots of yellow.
The color is intense but the blossoms are tiny. It's hard to relate how much color these two bushes will provide along the roadsides over the next couple of weeks.
The rabbits have been voracious this winter. They have eaten the lower limbs of the pines and destroyed many other plants. I'm not sure why, since this wasn't a particularly cold or snowy year.
We have been con-
founded at how they managed to eat inside the rabbit-
guard, which is the name of this fencing. They have permanently disfigured this holly plant. The signature of a cottontail attack is the 45 degree angle they leave at their point of munching, so said the Cooperative Extension when I took in some of our damaged plants last year.
This is the tree that has us scratching our heads. They've eaten up for a couple of feet. That would have made sense if we had gotten any kind of appreciable snow this winter, but we didn't. Can a cottontail stand on it's hind feet and eat this high? They ate our Oregon grape too, supposedly a rabbit-safe plant. We know they don't like: lavendar, santolina, Scotch broom, lemon thyme and day lilies. I'm sticking to that menu.
On the tea-towel front, this is the desert-
peach pink that I tried today. It absolutely masks the yellow. I find that fascinating. After talking to Beryl last night, I've decided to change up the warp next time, the threads per pattern and use the Fibonacci sequence. My new order of warp is supposed to arrive on Tuesday, so you know what I'll be doing on Wednesday!

And I've started weaving on the next lap blanket. This is the light gray wool from one of my brother's sheep that I then overdyed with out-of-season rabbitbrush. It's a very pale gold but what I especially like is that the dark gray flecks of the fleece are showing through the dye.

I got an email this afternoon that absolutely thrilled me. My friend Heidi said that she has been infected by my dish towels and has warped her loom to weave a set of her own. I cannot think of any higher praise.

Oh, and I've meant to say since last month that I've now embarked on my 7th year of blogging. It doesn't feel like seven years, but it does to Google, because I'm now paying storage. That seems fair for a seven years worth of words and pictures. Since it was really last month, I should have waiting until May 7th for drama but I wasn't sure I'd remember on May 7th so today is my 7th anniversary.

Natural Dye Day

I finished spinning the light gray Romney/
cross fleece from my brother's flock - actually I have a little more fleece left but this is what I calculate I'll need to weave a lap robe. I had this fleece processed quite a while ago, and since it's not a particularly interesting color or soft for that matter, I haven't been inspired to spin it. And now I have, 1 1/2 pounds of it - here are both warp chains and weft skeins.
I decided to overdye this yarn with rabbit-
brush before weaving with it. The gold over gray should give me a brassy color, or even better, a military green. The bushes with the light fluffy tips are rabbitbrush. It's just starting to green up but won't bloom until September, but the dye is in the plant more than the blossoms. The green plant in the foreground is Brown's Peony.
This peony is a shy plant. It's flower heads droop and never show unless you lift them to to view them. They're prevalent in the south end of the valley but this is the only one we have and it comes back every year. Livestock don't eat it so it's not particularly popular. Hmm, I wonder what color it would be in a dye pot.
Collecting the dye stuff took about 45 minutes and it was intense work, cutting and snipping into pieces. It takes a lot of bending and stooping to get 1 1/2 pounds of rabbitbrush. And I wondered why I was so sore tonight!
I checked the dye liquor after cooking the brew for a little over an hour. This is the last of our nice days and the weather was already starting to turn and I was starting to feel rushed.
The challenge in changing weather is the wind, and after the wind blew out my burners a couple of times near the end, I realized I needed to call it good. It didn't quite get the hour it needed, but I've set it all in the garage and will leave it for the next several days where the color should intensify. I'm pleased with the color as it is and know it will look great in our living room. I had planned to gift this lap robe but I think it has parts of both my brother and me, and so it will stay here.
Ian helped me with the whole thing, lifting the heavy pot, straining the liquor and babysitting the burners. He helped me get that pot in the garage and took apart and stored the burners for me and not a moment too soon. We had barely finished when the storm ripped though here, mixed hail and heavy rain.

Storms come through here in bands which is very typical. We were getting drenched and our neighbors to the south of us were not. I'm not complaining - rain is welcome - but it was a close call for my project. The spring weather we've had for the past three days has thusly concluded.
This is my new and current spinning project, the last fleece from my brother's flock. He said the ewe was a Churo/Corriedale cross. I have no idea what it is - not sure of his assessement - but it's easy to spin, has no crimp and is actually quite soft. It was make a great lap robe. I'm making a dent in that massive stash - even better!

End of Spring Break

I've said many times that my mornings starts with coffee and spinning, a substitute for all the years of morning runs. It's been a good substitution. It lets the cobwebs clear out and the day to dawn. Alexia started asking when we'd make bread when I was still on my first cup. I told her when the microwave clock said 10:00, we would start. We started making bread right after breakfast! When it came time to knead, she squatted like a monkey on the counter and did a credible job. She doesn't lack for focus.

I had anticipated spending time in the studio while the yeast worked. Alexia wanted to help. I was a nervous wreck, since I've skinned myself too many times on the drum carder. She pulled up my sewing chair and carefully cranked the handle. We carded enough for me to spin another bobbin in the morning.
She got to pick which loaf she wanted to take home to her family and this was her choice. It takes just short of five hours to make bread and that's rough when you're seven years old. She kept turning on the oven light to check, in between asking me if it was ready.
The bread turned out great. I've made this recipe from Joy of Cooking many times over the years since my father-in-law gave me that cookbook as a Christmas present so his son wouldn't starve. Ian and I had it with soup tonight after I returned Alexia to her parental units. It's very quiet tonight - the dogs and cat are exhausted, as are we. Back to normal, until the next time, and we humbly always hope there will be a next time.
As for rabbit brush, this is what I might expect. I've gotten a more bright yellow than this, but I'd be happy with this. It all depends on the color of the wool. I think this would be from an oatmeal fleece, gray wool would give green and paper white would give National Geographic yellow. I'd also like to try sagebrush for green, but I'm highly allergic to it so if I can get green from rabbit brush over gray, I might just stick to that. It's just that I'm running out of gray wool. I'm sticking my fingers in my ears when I think what I'd get by making an indigo bath for yellow over blue. I can't hear you, la, la, la.

We have to turn around tomorrow and get this house cleaned up. We're hosting a meet-and-greet for a candidate in the democratic primary on Sunday. She is a Latina and we support many of her positions, and also her thoughts on women and minorities. We decided to stop complaining and do something - this is our something.