weaving | Local Color Dyes

December 15, 2011December 17, 2023

Black Walnut Dye Project

OK, I haven’t sewn a new book in a couple weeks because I have been taking advantage of the extended fall weather and have been dyeing (outdoors) with some particularly stinky and stainy dyes: weld, black walnut, and an ancient umbilicate lichen vat from 2006. Each one deserves a post of its own, so I’ll start with the black walnut.

The black walnut has been an unintended exhausting marathon. That’s a pun. “Exhausting” is what you call it when you re-use the same dyebath (or dye liquor, or ooze, depending who’s talking about it) multiple times until there is no color left. One of my on-going projects is to weave a series of rya rugs using a limited palette of yarns that I have dyed with a given quantity of plant material.

To dye the yarn for the first rug, earlier this summer I dug 5.5 lbs. of Lady’s Bedstraw roots. This quantity ended up dyeing 2lbs. 12 oz. of wool in various shades of pink, peach, apricot, salmon, and, yes, warm beige. Beige in any of its various shades is not my (or, I think, any dyer’s) favorite color. Certainly it comes in handy when you need some neutral to balance out a design. But considering all the work involved in dyeing with plants, especially when you start with the raw materials themselves, it’s not really worth it just to make beige, even warm beige. There are plenty of beige sheep. Creating beige does not inspire awe, or joy, in the dyer. It also does not impress non-dyers with the power and magic of natural dyes. Since part of my concept with this project is to demonstrate the incredible range of color that a single plant–even a single dyebath–can generate, too much beige defeats the purpose.

This year, as you may recall, was a bumper year for black walnuts around here. I decided to commemorate the bumper black walnut year with a rya rug, even though I often joke that dyeing white wool brown is a questionable pursuit (there is probably a fairytale about the foolish girl who spent her time and energy on this…). There are plenty of brown sheep. Nevertheless, I really love noticing and celebrating the natural world around me, whether events are daily and mundane or unusual and remarkable. Being aware of and participating in the cycles of plants, especially, is one of my great joys in life, and one of the reasons I am passionate about natural dyeing. Plus, you can get an incredible range of colors from black walnut. Thus began the mega-black walnut project.

After the bedstraw experience, I decided I didn’t want as many beige skeins relative to the total quantity of yarn. So, I started with an admittedly huge amount of walnut hulls hoping for a lot of nice dark browns and not so many beiges. OK, you can already tell at this point in the story that I was dreaming, but my vision was blocking my vision, so to speak, and I can only see that in hindsight. I started with nine and a half pounds of walnut hulls that had been soaking in buckets outside for several weeks. I usually think that boiling walnut hulls smell delicious, but these had an unpleasant “swamp” smell due to the fact that they had been decomposing in the relatively warm weather. So, this had to be an outdoors project, using the portable electric burner.

I don’t have large pots, so this whole operation is being run with small pots and small quantities. In fact, I’m thinking “Small Potatoes” may become the name of the series (assuming I ever actually weave these things). I divided the hulls between two pots and extracted the same hulls twice, creating 4 different dyebaths.

When extracting the hulls you can let them boil and it won’t hurt the color, but it will make a huge mess if it boils over, so I kept a close watch. Above see the transition from, “a watched pot never boils,” to “boiling!” On the spoon is a portion of a hull in the dyepot.

Below on the left you can see the white skins being mordanted with aluminum sulfate, and on the right, the rich color of the dye bath once the hulls were strained out.

Ah, turning white wool brown!

Those four original dyebaths have thus far dyed 4 pounds of wool, in successive batches of 4 ounces each, and I have yet to reach beige (I’ve gotten to tan). I have been mulling for many days now whether or not to continue. I already have plenty of wool for a rug, at least a rug of the size I initially envisioned. But I have not truly exhausted the baths. I think I could dye another pound of wool before I actually exhaust the color.

I took a hiatus from the walnut project when we had a cold snap, and my pots and buckets froze (too stinky to keep indoors). Here are hulls with frost on them (which I could even extract again, if I was crazy) and a frozen dyebath:

But I think I have to continue to the point of true exhaustion. A bumper walnut year calls for an epic quantity of brown yarn, and perhaps an astonishingly big rug.

December 13, 2011December 17, 2023

More About My Books

Well, the Cottage Street Studios open house was very interesting. Here’s a photo of my books and some of Amanda’s gilded acorns, wishbones, and gourds around a festive winter-time tree. She also makes stunning gilded panels, frames, and other treasures. I met lots of great people and had inspiring conversations. My books have now moved to Food For Thought Books in Amherst where they are available for sale. Here they are on display at the bookstore:Making these books is a multi-step process. I haven’t photographed every step, but I thought I should give an overview. Understanding the process helps people to understand the labor and expense involved in creating a handmade object.

First I wove the cloth, using a variation of the traditional overshot pattern called Young Lovers’ Knot. This involved calculations about the sizes of the books and shrinkage of the cloth, as well as all the steps involved in dressing a loom. I put on a warp long enough to make 12 books. Even though I really loved the pattern and enjoyed playing around with different color combinations, I was happy to get to the end of the warp when I finally finished it; it took a long time to weave. The pattern requires two shuttles, one with a thin thread (20/2, same size as the warp) and one with a thicker thread that makes the pattern. So, it went slowly. Here’s the end of the warp.

Then I washed, dried, and ironed the cloth, and cut it into sections.

Then, for each book I decided whether to show the front or back of the cloth, because the two sides look very different. For example, in the photo of the black and white cloth, the piece on the left, with the white squares (tables) in the center of the round motif, shows the “right” side of the cloth. With this color combination, I preferred the back side.

I used a paper template to center the pattern on the cover. I am a symmetry fan, so I was going for symmetry even if I didn’t always attain it. Cloth has a mind of its own. Once I framed the portion of the pattern that I liked, I cut the cloth to size, and glued the cloth onto book board (8.5 inches by 5.5 inches) with PVA glue.

I managed to waste very little cloth in this process, which on the one hand I was pleased about because the cloth took so long to weave that I didn’t want to waste it. On the other hand, I might give myself more of an allowance next time (i.e., weave a couple more pattern repeats in width and length) to give me more design flexibility. Here are my scraps:

Then I trimmed the corners, and glued down the edges of the cloth on the inside of the cover. Then I pressed the covers. When they were dry, I cut and glued down nice papers on the inside of the covers. Matching paper colors and cloth colors is also a whole decision-making process. Here’s me gluing down the papers.Then I pressed the covers again until the glue was dry. Meanwhile, I folded the signatures, and put them under weights for a while. When the covers were dry, I punched holes in the signatures and holes in the covers with an awl, and sewed the whole thing together with 4 ply waxed linen thread. Ta-da, a book. Six are done, and six more are in the works.

December 4, 2011December 17, 2023

New Handbound Books with Handwoven Covers

Today I am bringing my new crop of handbound books to the Cottage Street Open Studios, where my friend Amanda kindly invited me to offer them for sale alongside her gorgeous gilded pieces.

The cloth for the covers of my new books is woven in a traditional overshot pattern called Young Lovers’ Knot. I wanted the scale of the pattern to be small and intricate, so the warp and tabby weft are 20/2 cotton. The pattern wefts are 10/2 cotton, 10/2 tencel, and 22/2 cottolin. The cottolin is a blend, 60% cotton/40% linen, and I hand dyed it blue with woad from my garden. The rest are commercially dyed. The cloth took a ridiculously long time to weave. Then there was the problem of where to dry it since it was very long. It dried inside and outside.

I wove two pieces without the emboldening tabby, a red one and a green one. So, the cloth for this red book is a small piece of history, now made famous right here in this post!After the first two pieces, I resolved my emboldening tabby problem. To make sure your emboldening tabby stays consistent, you need an even number of picks at each turning point in the pattern, i.e., in the center and at the end. I had added a pick at the end of the pattern, but later decided to take out two picks in the center of the pattern. This created a shorter, less busy-looking square or “table” in the pattern.

Each book is unique. Here are a few photos of the books:

Coptic Bound Book Spines — Coptic bound spines

Green tencel and teal tabby — Green tencel pattern yarn and teal tabby

November 17, 2011December 17, 2023

Emboldening Tabby

My Emboldening Tabby Dilemma

I have been weaving for the past few days (whoo hoo!). I am making cloth for my next batch of hand bound books. In the face of a million possibilities I decided to stick with something traditional. So, I picked a few miniature overshot designs with names I thought might be appealing and/or seasonal, such as Young Lovers’ Knot and Star of Bethlehem, did some math, wound a warp, dressed my loom, and got to work.

I decided to start with the Young Lovers’ Knot. (Actually, I don’t know if it’s one lover or more than one for that apostrophe.) My warp is black 20/2 cotton which I picked because I wanted the scale of the pattern to be proportionate to the size of the books. Well, it is delicate and pretty, but in retrospect my choice of yarn was crazy since it is taking forever to weave. For the tabby I’ve been using the same 20/2 black as the warp, and for the pattern I picked red in 10/2 cotton, thinking lovers, drama, passion….

Anyway, the point is, the second repeat of the design looked very different from the first and I though I had made a mistake. “Hmm. Weird. Haven’t woven overshot in a while, must be rusty.” I checked my treadling carefully and everything was accurate. I used my trusty angle-measuring tool, set at 45 degrees, and my beat wasn’t consistent between the repeats; one repeat was more square than the other. I figured my beat was the problem, and that I would settle into a rhythm after a while. So I kept going, and finished up the red section. The problem didn’t go away. I didn’t mind the alternating look between pattern repeats because it was consistent and kind of rhythmical. In fact, I liked the little daisies in the corners of the less compact version of the pattern. Daisies, diamonds, daisies, diamonds. Not too bad.

I decided to switch colors and yarns. For the new pattern yarn I picked 10/2 tencel in a bright green. Shiny, vibrant, almost neon… passion of a different sort. But same thing after two more repeats: they looked distinctly different, but again I checked and confirmed I had not made a treadling error. Why did it keep happening the same way each time? It would be an unlikely coincidence if I kept making the same mistake in the same place in the pattern each time.

Then I remembered: emboldening tabby! Clearly that was my problem, but since it was happening on a nice, regular basis, it wasn’t really an eyesore. Maybe I didn’t really need to fix it. However, it kept bugging me because I knew how to solve the problem.

Why Overshot Has an Emboldening Tabby Problem

Overshot is a weave structure where the pattern is created with long weft floats. They would be too unstable to be useful unless you secured the floats to a stable background. To make a stable background, you weave a pick (or row) of plain weave between each pick of pattern weft. Typically the plain weave thread is the same yarn as the warp, and the pattern weft is much thicker. Plain weave is a very stable weave structure because it has the maximum number of intersections of vertical (warp) and horizontal (weft) threads. For some reason that I’ve always meant to look up, plain weave is also called tabby, especially when it’s used in this way to alternate with pattern wefts.

Plain weave is made up of two alternating sheds: usually all the odd numbered shafts or harnesses work together, and all the even ones work together, and they alternate. They are sometimes called tabby a and tabby b to tell them apart. For overshot, you weave one row of pattern, then tabby a, the second row of pattern, then tabby b, the third row of pattern, back to tabby a, and so on.

Depending on your overshot pattern, one tabby tends to push the pattern weft floats apart, and the other tends to let them squeeze together. The pushy one can make the pattern pixelated, slightly elongated, or hard to see. The squeezy one helps the pattern pull together and look compact and distinct. The proper term for the squeezy tabby is “emboldening tabby.” You want the emboldening tabby. I was only getting the emboldening tabby on every other pattern repeat. Rats. After weaving the green section I decided, for the sake of consistency and for the sake of my good name as a master weaver, to fix it.

So, I counted the number of picks in the pattern repeat… an odd number. That meant that every time I started the pattern again, I was on the opposite tabby. You can add or subtract a row from the pattern to get an even number of picks in the pattern, which will fix this problem. Where you add or subtract the row, of course, changes the look of the pattern slightly. Also, the problem wasn’t at the “turning point” in the middle of the pattern (it’s symmetrical) because the top and bottom of each repeat were consistent; the problem happened between the repeats. So I decided to add a pattern pick at the end of the pattern each time. Ta Da! Consistent emboldening tabby. It no longer bugs me.

See for yourself.

alternating emboldening tabby in overshot — Emboldening tabby alternates. Compare the middle row with the upper and lower rows.

The middle row has the emboldening tabby. If you look in the denser, square sections of the motif (OK they’re rectangular), the places with four little lines in a row should make a small box with no gaps between the rows. In the bottom and top rows of the pattern, there’s a gap between the four identical rows, so they are separated into two rows of two lines. It doesn’t look terrible, right? But it’s not considered ideal.

Below (different color weft) the emboldening tabby is consistent in each repeat of the pattern. In the circumscribed squares, the areas where four identical rows occur look the same from one repeat of pattern to the next.

consistent emboldening tabby in overshot — Emboldening tabby is consistent between pattern repeats.

November 12, 2011December 17, 2023

Thankful Barron Taylor

In case you are looking for it, I just renewed Linen Heirlooms by Constance Dann Gallagher (Newton Center, MA: Charles T. Branford Company, 1968) from our local library. The author gathered and analyzed handwoven linen textiles from New England, New York state, and Pennsylvania, dating from the 19th century. Many people donated items for her study. Her book contains drafts for each of the items, based on her analysis of the cloth, some photos, and information about the donors and weavers. She also explains the operation of 19th century looms, the processing of flax, and the weave structures represented in the collection. Many of the pieces, if not all, were made of fine handspun linen yarns. (OK, not like the ancient Egyptians, but at 30-60 epi still quite fine.)

Having been a little bit obsessed with flax lately, I have really enjoyed reading it. I have been amazed and inspired by the hours of labor and creative energy that went into each piece, the care with which the pieces were saved by the families who inherited them, and the effort that Ms. Gallagher put into the study. Eventually this collection became part of the Smithsonian Division of Textiles in Washington D.C.

The author herself inspires awe, being a Master Weaver who, according to the blurb on the book jacket, “combined marriage and a career in bacteriology and various types of medical research,” along with motherhood. Her fine linen pieces won awards at NEWS (which I attended for the first time this summer!). I have also found the stories about the weavers and their families touching and inspiring.

One weaver whose story especially captivated me is Thankful Barron Taylor (1801-1896). Thankful lived in Washington, Vermont. By the way, she is not the Thankful Taylor from Tennessee who was famous for having a snake in her belly. And also by the way, Thankful Barron Taylor’s mother was from our fair city, Amherst, MA. 12/17/2023 Edited to note that the link to the Rutherford County Historical Society article about Thankful Taylor seems to have issues, so I removed it.

Thankful was educated at home. At the age of 15 she was inspired by a preacher who quoted from the New Testament in the original Greek. She wanted to read the Greek scriptures, and asked the preacher if she could borrow his books. He said, “No way, José,” or words to that effect. Many years later she was able to acquire said scriptures in Greek along with a Greek-Latin Latin-Greek lexicon. Excellent! The only problem was she now had to learn Latin as well as Greek to translate the darn thing. “No problemo,” she said (or words to that effect). “I can do that while I spin, hombre!”

To give you a taste of why I find Thankful’s story so sweet, here are some tidbits from an article by Washington, VT compatriot Lena Roberts, cited in the book. “[Thankful] had a predilection for metaphysical and scientific works. She is in sympathy with Spinoza. […] She gave much attention to chemistry […]. She hatcheled and spun the flax and wove the canvas, on which she wrought in colors the combining proportions of the elements.”

Here I’m picturing a needlepoint or crewel work periodic table, and I want one.

“The study of botany, zoology and biology, with the aid of a microscope, have been pursued with avidity.” This in addition to raising a family and all the daily labors of a household. She earned $12 (which must have been a lot of cash in those days) to buy a dictionary by spinning yarn for several weeks.

According to an article from the Boston Globe in 1892, “[…] [A]fter the spinning wheel had earned the books, it had all the family to provide for. So study and work went hand in hand. The old lady would sit at her wheel, busily spinning, with her Latin grammar and her Greek grammar, and her Worcester’s dictionary propped open before her, and through the long afternoons the crooning conjugations of amo would mingle with the drooning whirr of the spinning wheel.”

OK, I’m sure this account is romanticized, but I still love Thankful Barron Taylor. Her pieces in the collection include a point twill and two 5 harness spot Bronson designs. She lived to the ripe old age of 95; December 17th, 2011 will mark the 115th anniversary of her death. Thank you, Thankful!