This afternoon I cracked open my new American Craft magazine. (It came a few days ago, but I wanted to finish the latest Science News first.) I had to pause for a moment when I saw the cover. “Hey, I know that guy,” I first thought. Then I was like, “No, he’s on TV. Help me, memory. Media worlds are blurry…. Um, am I awake? Ron Swanson!” In that order.
And I love this article about Nick Offerman. I love that he actually makes beautiful things with wood, that he is a craftsperson, that he thinks we should “take back our self-sufficiency,” that he urges people to read Wendell Berry. All of it.
I was surprised and inspired. I smiled and felt silly and gleeful.
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.
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.
Emboldening tabby is consistent between pattern repeats.
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!
Last week I borrowed a flax break from Kathy Furst Coache, fellow weaver and flax aficionado (check out her shop and classes at http://www.westfieldyarn.com/). It’s a lovely antique, and it was very kind of her to loan it to me.
Kathy’s antique flax break
A flax break (or brake) is one of the tools used to process flax, which is the plant that linen is made from.
To make linen, you want the bast fibers, which are the long, strong fibers that run vertically the length of the stalk, between the skin or bark and the woody core (as I understand it, these fibers are basically the phloem of the plant–N.B. June 2017 update Actually, the fiber bundles in the flax stem are their own structures, distinct from the phloem! Sorry for the misinformation.).
After harvesting, you dry and ret the flax. I will go into my personal retting history in another post. After retting, rinsing, and drying again, you use the break to smash up the woody material.
The arm of the break (inside)The bed of the break. Insert the flax close to the pivot point between the bed and the arm.
Using the break involves repeatedly slamming the arm of the break down onto a handful of your retted flax, and partially crushing up the woody material.
Me breaking flaxThe shives are the short pieces that have broken off the stems.
If the flax has been retted properly, the woody material, called shives or boon, should pop off and separate from the bast fibers. Well, it’s not exactly woody. It’s sort of like very stiff straw, but it can give you splinters.
My hoard of retted flax consisted of 3 years of flax harvests from 2007, 2008, and 2010. I’d been storing these in three storage bins (43”x19”x6.5”) and two bundles that didn’t fit into a bin, which had been crammed into our hot water heater closet. One bin had been living under the bed, and two in the closet in the bedroom. This year’s crop is rolled up like a dead body in the back of the car. (I am planning to save the seed, but that’s another post).
I made the most of the glorious sunny weather on Saturday October 22nd, and Monday and Tuesday the 24th and 25th, since rain and snow were in the forecast for later in the week. For those three days I worked for 8 hours each day. Maybe I would get faster with more practice, but it was slow going! It alternated between being really fun and satisfying, and really boring and tedious.
In three days of steady work I managed to break the contents of two out of the three containers, plus the loose bundles. Here are some of my results.
Two bundles of broken flax and one not yet broken.
After breaking, there is scutching or swingling to remove the rest of the shives, then hackling (or heckling or hetcheling) to separate the shorter tow fibers and straighten out the long line fibers. Then, finally, you can spin your yarn and weave your cloth.
Phew! Talk about slow cloth. This project takes the cake–slow, slower, slowest.
Many thanks to Sally and Bob Fitz of Small Ones Farm for inviting me to table at their fruit CSA pick up days on Saturday October 1st and Wednesday October 19th. It was very inspiring to meet their members, and I had many stimulating conversations about CSAs, locally sourced materials, natural dyes, local wool, flax, and vegan cloth.
At my table I displayed a basket of naturally dyed wool yarns that were mostly handspun by me, over the years, using natural dyes. For the madder, I displayed the results of a dye bath using roots from Earth Guild. (I have also bought madder root from Tierra Wools and Aurora Silk.) For all the rest, I used plants I gathered or grew myself in Amherst or the surrounding area. When I first began spinning, the most economical way to acquire a lot of wool was to buy raw fleeces. I bought and have enjoyed working with Corriedale from the former Mad Women’s Farm in Amherst, Dorset/Border Leicester cross from Natural Roots in Conway, Coopworth from Shirkshire Farm in Conway, the mixed breed flock at Hampshire College, and Romney and mohair from a few farmers I met at the Webs fleece markets. After I got tired of washing and carding my own wool, I’ve enjoyed roving from Balkey farm in Northfield and others. I also had a smaller basket of naturally dyed linen (commercial 40/2 from Webs). The yarns (and my bundle of home grown flax) were for show and tell.
And for sale, I had handbound books with handwoven cloth covers.
Some of my hand bound books with handwoven covers.
I ended up with 5 lbs. 11oz. of cleaned Lady’s Bedstraw roots. I extracted the roots in two batches because they didn’t all fit in one pot. The first pot held 4 pounds, and the second was 1 pound 11 oz. I extracted each batch of roots twice, and used the baths separately. With the first batch, I put in one and a half Tums for the calcium and I watched the temperature closely (not exceeding 150 degrees F.), but had forgotten about pH with the bedstraws. After straining out the roots, initially the color of the first skein was very drab and I was pretty disappointed. Then I checked the pH and was amazed to see it was pH5 despite the Tums. I took out the skein, added calcium carbonate and washing soda (I ran out of soda ash), and brought the pH up to between 9 and 10. I reintroduced the skein, and woo hoo, pink! A sort of 1980s Giant Foods raspberry sherbert shade.
I extracted the second batch of roots with calcium carbonate and washing soda. In part, I think that explains the difference in the color between the two batches. I also think the smaller batch had more of the thicker (presumably older) woody roots relative to the thinner, presumably younger ones. Anyway, the colors are distinctly different. After many days of making and exhausting dyebaths with the roots, I have dyed 2 and a quarter pounds of singles rug wool. Here are some of the results (and in the background are some of our beautiful habañero plants):
Part way through the process, here are the yarns dyed with Lady’s Bedstraw roots. The pinker colored yarns on the left are from the first batch of roots, and the orange colored ones on the right are from the second.
I have exhausted a couple more baths since this photo was taken, yielding lighter colors. I also tried one pound of the tops, but got a pretty boring yellowish beige. There were about 4 more pounds of tops but I decided not to bother using them. I am currently soaking the roots for a third extraction. After they had softened up, I cut the woodier chunks into smaller pieces. I managed to break our non-food food processor trying to grind them up (annoying!) so chopped up small will have to do. I expect I can get one or two coral colored skeins before all is done.
This past weekend I had a lovely visit with my mother at her farm in New Hampshire. While I was there, I finally dug up some Lady’s Bedstraw which I had planted about 10 years ago. At the same time that I planted a bed of Lady’s Bedstraw, otherwise known as Yellow Bedstraw or Galium verum, I also put in a bed of madder (Rubia tinctorum, both ordered as seedlings from Richters in Canada). I dug up the madder two years ago when I wanted to establish a new bed, but hadn’t gotten around to the bedstraw.
When I first planted it, my mother and I very diligently prepared the raised beds with lime and chicken manure and other amendments, and then they sat and mostly had to fend for themselves. The boards holding up the beds rotted. The blackberries moved in. The bedstraw held its own.
Galium verum with blackberries
People usually say to harvest the roots after 3 years. Better late than never. After so many years in the same location, the bedstraw has decided to expand its territory. We do not want it to spread too far in case it proves difficult to control.
I dug about a fifth of the bed on Sunday October 9th. The roots and tops were hard to separate, so I collected them together in bags.
bags of bedstrawYellow bedstraw roots freshly turned overTwisty roots
Like other bedstraws and madder, the plants spread by setting down roots from the nodes on the stems, as well as by seed. A lot of the roots were small. A few were amazingly thick and interlocked. Even though it’s fall and the aerial parts of a plant are supposed to be dying back, there was plenty of fresh greenery.
Plants are amazing. Tender new growth despite a couple frosts. I love that crazy yellow where the new shoots come out.
The combined weight of the bags was 17 lbs.! A lot of that was soil. Rinsing the soil off, separating the greenery from the roots, and cutting up the roots took me a couple days.
Five gallon bucket of roots soaking to rinse off the soil. They didn’t all fit in this bucket.Clean wet Lady’s Bedstraw rootsSome good sized roots, but see penny for comparison. There weren’t a lot of roots as thick as these.A very dense root cluster. It took me a while to get to the heart of this.Woody root core
After washing and trimming, the roots weighed 5 pounds. I plan to use these roots, and perhaps the tops, for the first in a series of rya rugs. My idea is to dye the wool for each rug with locally grown or gathered natural dyes. The palette of each rug will be determined by certain parameters, for example, whatever 5 lbs. of Lady’s Bedstraw can dye. Stay tuned for the dyeing results.
After sifting through a tiny fraction of the weld seeds I had collected and dried, I began to wonder whether I actually needed to separate them by color. More accurately, I began to hope that I didn’t have to, because even with the double-sift/shake-down method, progress was slow.
I decided to do a germination test. On July 3rd, I planted some yellow seeds, some brown, and some black. Lo and behold, a month later, none of the yellow or brown seeds had germinated, only the black ones had. These photos are from August 2nd.
Yellow Weld Seeds. No seedlings here.Brown Weld Seeds. No seedlings here, either.Black Weld Seeds. Ah ha!
Granted, it was a small-scale trial (I only filled 6 cells with each type of seed), but still I felt pretty satisfied that the lightest colored seeds are, in fact, immature, and not worth saving.
For many years I have been a teacher. In September you go back to school, and you get to tell people about what you did over the summer. I did a lot this summer, so this is the first installment of what will hopefully be several entries about my summer.
The Parable of the Weld Seed
You have probably heard the parable about the mustard seed, that from the tiniest seed the largest shrub grows. I get the point of this story, so I’ve been willing to overlook what I consider its botanical inaccuracy. But, being Literal Girl, I have always wondered why this saying is about mustard. Its seeds are pretty small, but not the smallest. You can’t really call it a shrub, and I don’t think that even very tiny birds could nest in its branches. The plant which deserves a parable about the smallness of its seeds, in my opinion, is weld.
Weld has eensy weensy seeds. In its second year it grows into a 5 or 6 foot giant, and while birds don’t nest in its branches, bees and other pollinators adore its flowers. Weld’s parable could be about persistence rewarded, or it might be a cautionary tale about obsessiveness. I’ll tell you my story and you can be the judge.
First year weld rosettes in September
Weld is a biennial. In my experience, it is slow to germinate and doesn’t produce much foliage the first year; it makes a flat rosette, which you can harvest but not in vast quantities.
The second year it bolts, blooms, and sets seeds. In A Dyer’s Garden, Rita Buchanan says you can trick it into flowering the first year if you plant it very early and expose it to frosts in the spring. This has happened in my garden once, but the plants didn’t get very big.
Weld in bloom. Flowers up top and seeds below. Note the happy bee.
Weld has a habit of continuing to add new buds and flowers to the tip of a flower stalk even after the lower ones have been pollinated and set seed. This makes it tricky to save seed from. But since one weld plant produces a zillion-jillion seeds, I can’t resist trying. Another annoying thing about it is that the seeds are safely encased in a tight little ruffle so they don’t shake loose easily. Well, you can crumble the little ruffle (I will find out the real botanical name for that and tell you later), but then the seeds are all mixed up with powdery ruffle-debris. Also, because some seeds on a stalk are mature and some are not, you get a jumble of black, brown, and yellow seeds plus the powdery debris, and some dried flowers and leaves. Very pretty.
But how to clean the seeds? I was pretty sure that only the black seeds were mature, since they tended to occur at the bottom of a stem and thus must be the oldest. I figured the others weren’t worth saving. When getting ready to plant in the spring of 2010, I diligently selected the darker colored seeds by shaking the seeds and debris onto a paper plate and picking up the darkest colored seeds with a damp finger (I licked it). Since you only need a few seeds to get a lot of plant material, I didn’t knock myself out with this method.
This summer I had the notion that I would save large quantities of dye plant seeds to package and sell. I cut the giant trunks of second year weld, and hung them to dry.
Me with an armful of weld. This is about a quarter of the harvest from four plants. Note cardboard.
Some seeds will fall out of their little ruffles, and if you’re doing small amounts you can catch them in a paper bag. Because of the quantity I was trying to process, I put a big sheet of corrugated cardboard underneath the drying flower stalks outside to catch any mature seeds that might fall. Because it sometimes rains, the big sheet of cardboard also became the thing to carry the flower stalks inside on to keep them dry. Then the big piece of cardboard became the thing I stored the weld flower stalks and seeds on while I got around to dealing with them. The big piece of cardboard took up space in the apartment or the car for a few weeks until sane people become tired of always having to be careful not to bump the big sheet of cardboard full of powdery-debris-that-mustn’t-be-spilled. The time had come to process the seeds.
So I began with my trusty finger-licking method, and a brush. It was tedious. Matthew (the sane person) pointed out that licking my fingers might not be an approved technique for seed saving, especially if I wanted to sell my seeds (“Want some free germs with that?”). A better method was called for. I did not want to try water flotation because getting all those seeds dry again seemed daunting. You can’t just sift out the seeds because they are the same size as the ruffle-debris. You can’t winnow because the seeds are so light. After much trial and error, we came up with the double-sift: first sift the too-big particles, then the too-small particles.
Getting ready for the first siftFirst sift results. Got rid of the leaves.Second sift with results in the tea strainer. Dried flowers removed.
This reduces the quantity of debris and increases the seed-to-debris ratio. At long last, I noticed that the debris could be separated from the seeds by tipping a piece of paper at an angle, and allowing the heavier particles to fall down. The seeds fell down and the dust stayed up.
Shake down method. Note seeds falling and debris staying at the top. Go gravity!
To some extent, the lighter colored seeds could be separated from the dark colored ones because the darker ones were heavier. So, I managed to get a certain amount of brown and black seeds collected. Still, it was slow going. It tried my patience. Then the voice of doubt began to whisper, did it really matter? Why waste my time separating them if I didn’t need to? Were the yellow and light brown seeds really immature? What if they’d germinate just fine? Stay tuned for the next chapter in the parable of the weld seed.
Mixed weld seeds after the double sift and shake down. Not a lot of black ones, alas.
This fall we are having a bumper crop of black walnuts here in Amherst. All summer I’ve been eyeing the big green spheres hanging high in the trees around town, anticipating the happy day when they would start to fall to the ground. The happy day has arrived. At the moment I have a 5 gallon bucket of hulls outside soaking, and three more full of nuts waiting to be processed.
Bucket of black walnuts still in the hull (12/17/2023 Edited to add: Looking more closely at this image, I think I had a mx of black walnut and butternut, here. The black walnuts are round and the butternuts are pointy.)
Thanks to a former student of mine, I now have a quick and fun way to get the hulls off the nuts. I used to laboriously cut off the hulls with a knife. This is time consuming and a bit dangerous. The hulls are thick and tough. After once staining my hands a really ghastly shade of mottled zombie skin, I always wore thick gloves for this task. But wearing gloves makes my hands sort of clumsy, and the hulls are juicy, and the knife can get slippy…. Fortunately, about 4 years ago, one of my students invited me to collect black walnuts from his mom’s back yard. While I was there, he showed me his method for getting the hulls off: place the nuts on a cinder block and whack them with a piece of 2×4. The hulls pop right off! You can bash ’em with a brick, too.
Ready to bash a walnut with my 2×4. You can smash several at a time, of course.There’s the walnut inside the hull.Hull on the left, black walnut on the right.
After all this bashing, what color do you get from black walnut hulls? Various shades of brown from rich and reddish to silvery grey. I have sometimes wondered whether it is foolhardy to dye white wool brown, when there is plenty of brown wool to be had. But I find black walnuts hard to resist. They are fragrant and abundant. And forgiving; you can let them rot in a bucket for months with no harm done. I let them freeze outside over the winter, which has been bad for the buckets but no problem for the walnut hulls. Some people find them a nuisance when they’ve been littering the ground for a few days, and get all smooshed up and brown and squishy. So really, why not use them? Since I have become more interested in dyeing plant fibers over the past couple years, my new quest this fall is to get a good dark color on linen yarn. Here are some images of walnut dyed wool and linen from seasons past. I’ll keep you posted on my dark-brown-linen ambitions.
Brown skein on the right is black walnut on handspun Corriedale mordanted with aluminum sulfate and cream of tartarCorriedale skein again, with black walnut exhaust on upper right (mixed breed fleece from Hampshire College Farm Center). Blues are from woad.Black walnut on wool and linen yarns and silk hankie
On Saturday, October 1st, I will be introducing others to the pleasures of black walnut hull-bashing, and the fragrant scent of simmering hulls, at Small Ones Farm in South Amherst. I’m hoping people get as much of a kick out of it as I do.
