Fiber Musings – Page 5 – Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast – mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Glazing

On 19 Sep, 2016

glazing

Next weekend, I will be taking a workshop on natural dyes with Anni Redding. She will show us dyes using cochineal and osage orange in 3 different depths of shade: light, medium and dark. I plan to dye the squares I’ve woven with the Zoom Loom a while back.

Since I plan to overdye some of the samples, if time allows, I wanted to get an idea of what the colors might look like.

Since overdying is similar to glazing technique with watercolors, I pulled out 3 colors that are close to the cochineal (quinacridone magenta), osage orange (nickel azo yellow), and indigo (phthalo blue – green shade). I painted 3 strips in varying depths of shade and glazed over them with additional colors.

Bottom up:

1st row/square: colors as is
2nd set of 3 rows/squares: glazed with yellow first, then red over 2, then blue over last
3rd set of 3 rows/squares: glazed over with red first, then red over 2, then blue over last

I pooped out over the darkest shade so they are not correct, but you get the idea. The order in which the glaze is applied does make a difference to the colors.

Anyway, fun coloring exercise. Let’s see how they turn out with dyes.

Indigo in the news!

By Ann

On 17 Sep, 2016

In Dye

A piece of 6,000-year-old fabric, dyed indigo blue. (Lauren Urana)

Researchers found evidence of indigo dyed fabric in Peru from over 6,000 years ago! How cool is that? This dates further back than previously found indigo from Egypt (by over 1,500 years).

Zoom Zoom

By Ann

On 2 Aug, 2016

In Weave

If after my last post, you thought that I had been Zooming along, you would be correct.Â This is just a portion of the squares that I’ve woven.

What are those tags, you ask? These squares have been mordanted (in 10% alum solution) and ready for a natural dye workshop later this month. We will be working with Osage Orange and Cochineal.

No worries. I will be approaching the dye workshop with my usual AR/scientific approach, hence the number of squares for just 2 dye materials.

Why squares? I just wasn’t into dyeing lots ofÂ little tiny skeins of yarn that I have no idea what to do with after the workshop is over. I thought long and hard about what I can do with small bits of yarn and Zoom Loom squares came to mind. Rather than dyeing yarn and, gasp! cut the yarn and throw away bits, I thought I would weave them into squares first.

The idea is thatÂ I would piece the squares into a gamp-like lap blanket. This means a whole lot more plain white squares need to be woven up.

Yarn — unknown 2 ply white wool yarn from my workshop bits bin. I won’t have enough yarn to weave the number of squares I need for a lap blanket. I’ll have to figure out what type of wool this so I can try and make more yarn to match. I know it is a sturdy wool. This princess doesn’t have much “sturdy” wool stashed. Hopefully, there are enough workshop fiber that I can figure something out.