7 Aug 2017

Iron Age

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Another derailment, this time thanks to my appendix, and so I have no loomy updates since I haven’t been near a loom. But yesterday we did fulfil a long-held plan to visit the Iron Age. Up beside Loch Tay the Scottish Crannog Centre celebrated their 20th anniversary with The Celts are Coming!, a weekend of demonstrations and activities. Of course there were textiles – spun, dyed and woven – and there was also leatherworking, pottery, cookery, tin- and bronze-casting, woodworking, stonecarving, iron-smelting, and probably more that my over-loaded head couldn’t contain. Just look at the bling factor of a bronze sword (below): isn’t it something? We spent all day asking questions and the demonstrators were extremely knowledgeable: the whole event was very well put together. There’s a list of exhibitors’ websites at the link above, in case you want to see more. Also… wild boar sandwiches for lunch. Yum.

 

“Iron Age” was posted by Cally on 7 August 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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24 Jul 2017

Another knot

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I’ve tried several different structures from Searles’ book of freeform techniques, but then decided I needed one which wasn’t there. So, putting her wisdom together with that of Barbara Walker, I have devised ‘freeform turned summer & winter’. With its two layers, the warp is very dense, so the first thing I discovered was that I couldn’t see my cartoon.

I had been just drawing an outline and then scribbling in it roughly, just enough to distinguish ‘outside’ from ‘inside’, since it is very easy to lose track of that when focusing on the individual pick.

But the density of the double warp meant that I kept reading my scribbles as boundaries and getting immensely confused. So I had to get the marker out and colour the whole thing in solid.

Well, I coloured in a photocopy. I’ve been using non-woven facing fabric for larger cartoons, as it rolls and unrolls nicely, but paper is fine for small sections. As this is a repeating pattern, the cartoon can be moved up to continue the next section, or I can just finish it off with a horizontal end bar in the same way that it begins.

The revised cartoon was still quite hard to see…

….but at least I could dig into the warp and know for sure whether I was looking at pattern or ground. And the next phase of weaving turned out much better.

I picked these yarns because they were lying around, about the right size, and not needed for anything, but the colours have turned out to be quite fitting. It is slow weaving, too.

“Another knot” was posted by Cally on 24 July 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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16 Jul 2017

New Tricks (for Picts)

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The season of significant birthdays continues…

Yes, I have joined a new club! The occasion was understated, thanks to post-holiday lurgy and the fact that I am among the youngest of my ‘cohort of peers’: eleven months of milestones and by the time my birthday comes around, I have pretty much forgotten that I am not already the next number up. So it was a lovely, quiet day. The sun shone and cake was eaten. And in other excellent news: the flies are vanquished!

Also… I got a beautiful new shuttle, which is poorly served by the following photo.

It’s a long low-profile shuttle and perfect for freeform weaving, which is something I have been playing about with for a few months (thanks to Meg). Some of you may have seen the freeform overshot banner I added to my Facebook page:

I’ve done quite a few pieces in white/off-white as I intend to experiment on them using natural dyes and inks.

One of my motivations is to be able to incorporate Pictish forms into weaving in quite a simple style. I could have sworn I had a photo of some samples I did with the Aberlemno serpent in different weave structures, but I can’t find it now. Most recently, though, I have been trying out a very simple Celtic knot design in freeform Bronson Lace and my shuttle arrived just in time to help me finish it.

(Isn’t that a beautiful shuttle? It slips so smoothly though that narrow shed…. *sigh*)

I really like the texture contrast of lace and plain weave, and one of my favourite weaves is a plain weave pattern on a lace ground: for some reason, I much prefer that to the opposite configuration of lace on a plain ground. It is quite easy to slip up and catch or miss threads, as you can see here (this is after washing):

But the new shuttle has made a big difference.

I found that with this piece I had to abandon my first version, which was based on a cartoon, and turn to graph paper to get a consistent rhythm to the lace-vs-plain. I am not entirely satisfied with version two either, as parts of the pattern don’t come through as clearly as I would like. This is most of it, held up against the window: I couldn’t step back far enough to get the whole thing in!

This journey started with a bit of warp in 2/6 cotton which was left after a workshop, and I have gradually worked my way down to a 2/16 cotton for the current warp. I am not sure how far I can go without a new pair of glasses: my eyesight has taken one of those sudden downward steps in the last two or three months, but I really want to hold out until the new year before I buy another pair of specs! I may stay with the 2/16 for a while… I am reasonably pleased with the resolution at this scale although it is still quite blocky. It’s one of the things I like about lace, that the floats tend to soften the edges of blocks and give them a more rounded look.

“New Tricks (for Picts)” was posted by Cally on 16 July 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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10 Jul 2017

Bump

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As in “Down to Earth with a…”

Re-entry into normal life after a holiday is seldom easy, though it is always lovely to be at home with the cats again. This time round, though, we seem to have hit a dozen domestic obstacles and have been completely derailed.

First there was the plague of flies. Yuck. Neither we nor the cooncil’s pest controller could find the source, so it is assumed that something must have died under the floorboards, or in one or other of the invisible nooks and crannies that an old house harbours, and we basically have to tough it out with traps etc until the something is all used up and the flies move on.

But then in dealing with the flies, we managed to break the bathroom blind, so we have to sort that out too. And when the blind came crashing to the floor, revealing the state of the window behind, we also realised we would have to do some decorating before installing anything new. Still, it is the right season for decorating – and for being blindless – since the evenings are long and light, so we made a start.

And promptly came down with a virus. S went first, which at least allowed me time to fulfil some teaching commitments last week, but I then lost the weekend in a fevered daze and am only just vertical again today. Meanwhile, the decorating remains in limbo, as do the cats, since they must be kept out of areas treated with fly poison…

I think I am ready for another holiday, to be honest!

“Bump” was posted by Cally on 10 July 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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17 Jun 2017

Michel Garcia Masterclass

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This has been the most stimulating week I have had in ages. As long-time readers of this blog will know, I am was not an enthusiast about dyeing although I do partake from time to time. It is certainly a good long while since I did any natural dyeing, but I have been giving it a lot of thought and felt that the time was right to try it. And it just so happens that Michel Garcia was returning to Scotland to do a one week masterclass at Big Cat Textiles in Newburgh, where he is something of a regular on the schedule.

And if I am going to explore natural dyeing, I might as well go straight to the master, right? I am particularly interested in the way Michel investigates historical practices and establishes contemporary alternatives which are ecologically sustainable and non-polluting, such as plant-based mordants and processes which involve no mordanting at all.

I can’t possibly do justice to this course in a blog post, and even my pictures are pretty poor, but here is a taste of what we got up to (captions appear on mouseover). Success in results is entirely due to Michel and my excellent classmates!

We got through a lot of lemons… Our first dyebaths were made with green tea and lemons, and were used for dyeing protein fibres. The results were stunning.

Then came a two-step process with symplocos leaves as our source of aluminium, followed by making indigo extract, dyeing with indigo and then dyeing with safflower. That amazing pink was worth the dozen rinses with our hands in cold water! (And it is definitely a help to work in groups of three, so your hands can thaw for two rinses)

We moved onto cotton, and made no-waste mordants to fix the colours. We had to speed up some processes to get our samples dry within the time constraints of the workshop. Alas my photos of the steamer made out of a towel rail, saucepan, funnel and stove pipe are too blurry to post.

Other processes not shown here: making cotton waterproof, using indigo, cutch, steam and the back of a spoon; testing plants for different types of tannin; the ‘Scottish vat’ made with malt syrup instead of fructose.

By the final day we were all quite dazed and stupid with tiredness. But even though I didn’t take everything in, I have a mass of samples and notes to keep me right. And I have the indigo vat! It came home with me, buckled into the boot of the car.

“Michel Garcia masterclass” was posted by Cally on 17 June 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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