ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
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Author name: ozweaver

Alchemy

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It’s that time of year again…..time to head south on Pandora.  But before I go back to living onboard there is SO much I want to do on land!

My small guild always has a natural dyeing workshop in October, and I’ve been looking forward to this all summer!  Bob and I made our plans to head south based on the date of this dyeing workshop.  My 4 lbs. of goldenrod was collected for this workshop, and I also planned to reconstitute my indigo vat.

Everything about natural dyeing seems like magic and alchemy…. The recipes are as old as civilization and some of the processes seem downright absurd!  Who figured out these strange concoctions and procedures??

I mordanted two 100 gram skeins of my handspun white alpaca with alum and cream of tartar.  I had two small hanks of fine linen (80/2) which will be for sampling bobbin lace designs (one for me and one for a friend), and I had a 100 gram skein of raw silk in the lovely natural color with black flecks.  I have not mordanted linen before, so that was my first challenge.  It requires some tannin along with alum.  Sure would have been great if I’d realized that in time to order tannic acid online.  Barring that I had to find something natural growing nearby or lying about.  My only option, since I didn’t find any oak galls on my trees, was to cut some sumac.  I’m not sure I’m ready to tell that story…. suffice it to say that henceforth, I will only cut sumac that is in flower so I can see that large red/brown flower stalk of the safe sumac. … ‘nuff said….

The dyeing workshop was fantastic!  It was held in Bozrah, Connecticut, a town I’d never even heard of before this event.  The drive there was stunning for an early October morning.  I drove along my side of the river for a bit, crossed the historic Haddam Bridge, and the drove along the east side of the river before turning northeastward toward Bozrah.  It was a beautiful morning with mist on the river burning off as the sun rose higher, and the trees almost at their most brilliant autumn color.

Our workshop was in the garden of a lovely rambling farmhouse with numerous outbuildings.  The gardens wound their way through the property giving privacy to each garden ‘room.’  The tables for the dye pots were set up on a slate terrace near the kitchen door.  The hostess uses one of the prettiest outbuildings for her weaving studio, and we all sighed and wished we could weave in such a bucolic setting!

Our dyes of the day were marigold, jewelweed, black walnut, onion skin, goldenrod, golden marguerite, indigo, and an orchil lichen.  Quite a nice selection!  I dropped one skein of alpaca into the onion skin bath and put the other one in my goldenrod.  When they were finished I had a wonderful combination of deep pumpkin from the onion and a beautiful gold from the goldenrod.  I wanted to get a green by dipping my goldenrod skein in indigo.

My indigo did not reconstitute, even with the addition of both thiourea dioxide and more dyestock.  It got the slightest bronze bloom but never turned yellow green.  It stayed blue.  When we dipped a trial piece in it the blue rinsed out completely.  Ugh.  One of the other women happened to bring a little indigo ‘kit’ and we mixed that up in an extra dyepot.  So I did get to dip my goldenrod-dyed alpaca to make a mysterious, very interesting green.  I can’t say that it coordinates as well as I’d hoped with my pumpkin colored onion dyed skein, but I love both colors!

The true excitement of the day for me was that lichen dye pot.  The woman who brought it has this particular lichen growing on rocks on her wooded property in Connecticut.  Lucky woman!  She is very careful not to take much of it, and the little she takes has lasted her for years.  I could not believe what a deep purple we got when we put in our various skeins of yarn.

 The lichen she uses is the one pictured at left on the cover of Casselman’s book.  It can be light green in wet weather or grey in dry weather, but the underside of the lichen is always a very dark almost-black.

Perhaps the lichen dyeing seemed the most like alchemy to me.  Sharon said that the fibers dyed with lichen need to stay wet for 24 hours and then dry in natural sunlight!  Doesn’t that sound magical?  Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tempt fate, so I brought my three lichen-dyed skeins with me down to the Chesapeake so they can get their sunlight under the dodger on Pandora. It’s been quite cloudy in the Chesapeake so I hope that won’t affect my color.

So… after my day of dyeing I returned home to throw some things in a bag in order to leave for Annapolis early the next morning.  I’ve been on board for a few days now, and we are heading south to Beaufort, North Carolina.  I will get off the boat there and Bob’s crew will drive my car to me so they can get onboard and I can drive home!

Annapolis is such a pretty city!…although I am reluctantly missing the beautiful fall colors of New England.  It was the last day of the boat show as we left the harbor.

We sailed to Solomon’s Island yesterday and on to a little creek just south of the Potomac River today.  We should be in Hampton, Virginia, by the weekend in order to participate in a big cruisers’ festival over the weekend.  We are already seeing many friends from our trip south last year.  It is such a small, small world….

This is the Thomas Point lighthouse that we passed on our way to Solomon’s Island.

The Wednesday Group

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A perfect first week of October…. it started with the beautiful drive to Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei’s studio along the Hudson River.  The drive takes me north into Massachusetts and then west through the Berkshires.  And although it was barely October the color was already reaching peak along parts of this drive! This month the Wednesday Group was quite large, 10 of us in all.  That can be a challenging number to fit into Archie and Susan’s studio, large as it is!  They have a generous enclosed porch that overlooks the Hudson, probably 40′ long with a wall of windows along that whole length.   The views are amazing and distracting! Large ships bearing gravel power by throughout the day and night, and there is pleasure boat traffic as well.

A couple of us are very lucky to stay right nearby at the house of a friend. Doing this means we get to have home cooked meals at night  and can bring homemade lunches to class.  We eat like royalty and enjoy evenings sitting out on the terrace watching life on the river amongst the herb garden and fruit trees.  This week the weather was warm and one evening, while having wine and cheese on the terrace we were entertained (and I was amazed!) by the loon-like call of a screech owl…..over and over…  it was idyllic!

 

 In spite of our numbers in class, we all seem to have gotten some good work done this month.  It’s great to be together, and a larger group ensures that there is plenty of inspiration and good vibes flowing.  I came home ready to get down to work!

….but WHAT work?  I am working on a sample for some lengthy text, an excerpt from the Robert Frost poem, “Mowing.”  This poem ends with:                    The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. 

  And I’m thinking about a photographic image that Christopher took from the passenger seat of our new car while facing backwards.  The photo was taken at dusk with with the fading light in the distance while cars are zooming along into the night, away from the light.  The image has a lot of motion and light and dark in it….it intrigues me.

Bucket of Gold

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Summer has ended with such glorious days!  Along my daily walk the views seem extra lovely, with dappled light coming through the canopy of tall trees, playing on the thick undergrowth of fern.  The light is getting long so it is particularly nice in the morning and late afternoon.  The goldenrod is glowing along the roadside…

And goldenrod is just what I need to donate to my guild’s annual natural dye day.  Bob came along with me to tote the large shopping bag as we both cut flowers.  I was aiming for two pounds, but before we knew it we had four!I sat on the front porch to cut the flowers into smaller bits. The smell of cut goldenrod is delightful!….green and sweet/spicy!

I never get tired of seeing the houses along this walk.  I like to imagine how I’d live in each of these houses, where I’d put my looms, how I’d make some gardens!

On the last full weekend in summer we finally had our first sail since returning home to New England.  We sailed down the Connecticut River, then spent a night at Fisher’s Island, then four days in Newport.  It’s been decades since either of us have toured any of the mansions.  We chose The Elms, which is considerably smaller than either The Breakers or Marble House but still quite impressive.  You can lunch in the carriage house.  The ambience is great, but the food not so much, so we opted to take a picnic to a nearby park.

I found a mansion that is just my size!  Unfortunately, it is not for sale… I can just imagine myself weaving on that upper floor…

We walked along the cliffwalk and along the harbor, where we were anchored.  We volunteered for few hours at the annual Newport Boat Show which gave us free admittance to all the exhibits.  Bob loved that!

Back at home, I am settling in to the first week of autumn.  My goldenrod dyebath is ready, my yarns are mordanted.  I’ve got a year old indigo vat that I’d like to reconstitute, and I’ve got fresh indigo ready to harvest.  That will be a new process for me!  I have a couple of tapestry designs swirling around my brain.  Bob is gathering firewood, and I am gathering apples.  I love the change of seasons!

Our son Rob visited over the weekend and saw his finished portrait for the first time.

Back at my looms, I am weaving a bit text and making good progress on the final painted warp.  It’s time to think about painting another warp!

 

 

Try This at Home

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Well, I have managed to use synthetic dyes completely unsupervised in my own house.  It’s taken me at least 20 years to get up the nerve and confidence to do this.  I know….  there has never been a logical reason for this, but it’s been a huge hurdle for me to attempt this at home!

I sectioned off about 1/2″ of warp at both selvedges to paint a solid color with the burnt orange.  And then I sectioned off an inch to paint in a pseudo-ikat effect.  Each of these sections was wrapped in it’s own bit of cling wrap to prevent any co-mingling of colors.  Finally, I painted the main, center section.

After a curing period of about 6 hours wrapped in plastic, I uncovered the warp to let it dry.  The far end of the warp is now suspended off the table for better air circulation.

Mixing Colors

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While mixing colors is fun and often quite a revelation, getting the colors  in my mind might take years of practice…..might, actually, never happen.  I did make a rather good burnt orange, but my cool deep red was a disappointment.  It is more burgundy than I would like…too similar in value to the orange.  So I needed a change of plan for the deep violet I’d wanted.  All three would have been far too similar.  So I’ve made a medium blue/teal.  It is not a true teal, but leaning that direction from medium blue.

My mixtures are:
Burnt Orange: 3/8 tsp. sun yellow, ‘spot’ of scarlet, ‘spot’ of new black
Burgundy: 3/8 tsp. fuschia, ‘spot’ of lemon yellow, ‘spot’ of black
Blue:  1/4 tsp. blue 401, 1/8 tsp. lemon yellow
Black:  3/4 tsp. new black

While mixing these colors (and tweaking!) at my kitchen sink, I watched three hummingbirds vie for the feeder….and the nusturiums….and the passion flowers….and the mille fleur petunias. They really do not like to share, and time is short before they head south.  Have you ever seen hummingbirds buzz each other?  While they are standing off, hovering, they really do look like fairies in the air!  Then they buzz by each other at lightening speed, too fast to see, and dart all about before hovering again.  It was quite a show!

This is not my photo although it is very similar to what was going on outside my kitchen window!

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