Woad is a biennial, which means it flowers and sets seed in the second year of growth. I thought I’d share a little bit about the life cycle of woad and how last year’s plants fared this spring and summer. Here are some photos of the state of things over at the dye and fiber plant garden at Bramble Hill Farm on May 15, 2016.
The woad was in bloom:
On July 18th and 19th I ran a woad vat! This is exciting because last summer I planted woad, but didn’t have time to use it for dyeing. That made me sad, and I vowed to rectify that this summer. This summer I planted two beds about a month apart, so that the leaves will mature at different times. I ran this first vat of the summer with much glee and happiness.
I stuck with my tried and true but not truly “sustainable” chemical vat, using ammonia and RIT Color Remover. One of these years I will learn how to precipitate my own woad powder and master a natural fermentation vat (maybe even the urine vat!). Meanwhile I dyed some fiber blue with my own woad and it made me happy. Continue reading “Gleeful Woad Vat”
It is now mid-July, a time of year which is inevitably humid here in Massachusetts and often rainy. It is also a peak time of year for harvesting many dye plants. The problem is, when it’s humid and/or rainy, where do you hang them up to dry? Not outdoors….
Here are the woad seeds I saved from the dye plant and fiber plant garden at Bramble Hill Farm. This was from just two or three plants, harvested on July 2, 2015. We had been having a dry spell and they had almost entirely dried on the plants before I cut them off. Yes, I do already have a lifetime supply of woad seeds, and yes, they stay viable for a pretty long time. But here’s my crop of woad seeds for 2015. They are very beautiful, in my opinion.
After I wove off that pink warp, dyed with madder, I finally put a new warp on the loom. It’s a blue warp, dyed with woad, for more “Jack Frost” pattern bookmarks. Amazingly enough, the first three came out exactly the same length! This is a feat of consistency of which I am rarely capable, so I was pretty happy. Here they are:
What I have been aiming for in my bookmarks is a woven length of 10 inches, with 1 inch of fringe on each end. This allows them to fit exactly into the stylish wrappers Matthew designed, which are 12 inches long. Continue reading “Bookmark Success!”
Due to one thing and another, I am not growing a lot of woad this year. I’m a little bit sad about it, but there it is. Nonetheless, I ran my first woad vat of the summer on Friday August 8th and had some interesting results. In the morning I picked 3 and a half pounds of leaves, which I did not expect to make a very strong vat.
Some blue color appeared in the stems as I ripped up the leaves, which was a good sign.
After those intense, vivid colors on 40/2 linen yarns from the first and second weld exhaust baths, I assumed there was still quite a bit of color left in the bath. I thought it would be fun to try a couple experiments. My first experiment was to put a mordanted cotton-linen blend skein in the weld bath overnight, but not to heat it at all.
Why would I even try this? Well, the answer is kind of a long story. Even though my usual method is to apply heat when extracting color and dyeing fiber, I am very aware of the fact that this requires energy. Way back in 2006 I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to travel to Kyrgyzstan along with feltmaker Karen Page, to work with a group of women in a village who wanted to develop a crafts business. My part of the project was to teach them what I knew about natural dyeing, and Karen’s job was to teach them new felting techniques. Continue reading “Exhausting the Weld Bath Part Two”
This summer I have spent most of my time and energy on weaving, but I didn’t want to let the summer end without at least a little bit of dyeing. So, last Friday I ran a woad vat, following my usual routine based on Rita Buchanan’s directions in A Dyer’s Garden and A Weaver’s Garden. The woad plants in the bed that self-sowed, and the transplants from that bed, were still pretty small. I lost about half of the plants in the bed affected by club root, which left one short bed with decent-sized (though a bit moth-eaten) leaves. I picked from all the beds, and collected two and a half pounds of leaves. I was worried that there wouldn’t be much color in the leaves yet because they were still small, but you can see the “breaking blue” as it oxidizes here on the cut stems:
This is always a good sign. Here I am rinsing off the leaves.
The other day I was trying to decide on colors for my next rya. My show at the Shelburne Arts Co-op goes up on October 1st, so the time is growing short. Plus, school is starting soon, which means much less time for weaving. I felt the need to get a sense of the work that I’d made thus far, so I spread the ryas out on the bed. Then I stood on a chair to get a good look. And here they are!
Then of course I had to dump a ton of yarns onto the bed and see what resonated with the collection as a whole. I ended up choosing another combination of oranges with greens at the center, this time, rather than the brown and blue combo I did before. Continue reading “Deciding on Colors for a New Rya”
After I finished the lichen-dyed rya the other day, I was close to the end of the warp. What to do? Plan a small project to make use of it? Cut it off? I had a similar problem earlier in the spring (see my “Too Short Warp” post). At that time I planned out a small project with green and yellow yarns, but I was ultimately stymied and I didn’t end up weaving it. I cut off the warp regretfully, since 8/4 linen warp isn’t cheap and I hate to waste linen because I know what goes into creating it. Continue reading “Green and Yellow Rya”
This summer I started out with two small beds of woad on opposite sides of the garden. Normally I don’t grow woad in the same bed two years in a row because it doesn’t do well the second year. I know you ought to rotate beds to interrupt pest and disease life-cycles, and I thought we were doing pretty well with this considering that our garden isn’t that big. My woad has been plagued by slugs and cabbage whites, but I’ve never had serious disease before. I’ve always chalked-up the deficiencies of a second-year woad bed to a nutrient problem, though I’ve never actually tested “before” and “after” soil samples to find out exactly what gets depleted. So, my original two woad beds this year were not planted in the same beds as last year. Continue reading “Woad Gets Club Root”
