landscapes

I took a weekend off last week, heading over to the western side of the state to gather dyestuffs and write. NaNoWriMo is a few months away and I came so close to finishing last year that I want to give it another, more planned out, try. I have a few new ideas about how I want to format the story. Maybe as a zine? I'm also narrowing the physical range of the main character, making it more local.

 On the way up to Grand Mesa I stopped briefly in the desert, up above the canyon where I grew up. I followed a hawk down this draw and found several patches of rabbitbrush, one seeded juniper and horehound. I didn't realize it was horehound until I got it home and was able to look it up. I thought it was a prickly sort of mint. Now I wish I had picked more, but at least I know where it lives. It felt like stumbling across a whole glass bottle from the 1800's.

 When I got home I put all of the plants in the dyepot together. It smelled amazing! The rabbitbrush can be overpoweringly medicinal on it's own but the rest of the plants balanced it out and it was like having a giant potpourri crock going on the stove all day.

emPHAsis on the art

I hate making up words to describe myself and what I do. For the longest time I didn't consider myself an artist, maybe a writer, but not an artist. There was no future in that. So I've gotten good at circling around, coating it with practical applications and poetic license. It feels sticky and gimicky at worst, far too prescious at best. When I started all this fiber business for fun and profit I told myself success would be being able to call myself a fiber artisan without feeling like I was lying. But even when i got to that point on this journey it felt untrue. Yes, the end result of what I sell often looks like a hat or a scarf or the materials for others to make the same, but the making part never felt utilitarian. It's always been my kind of art. The deeply process-based sort.

 

That's been my number since day one. I'm a notorious medium jumper. I've dipped a toe in oils, clay, photography before this and it's always been that flow state, like a trance, that feels like I'm doing the right thing. It has almost nothing to do with the finished object, if that turns out nice too its a plus but it's not where the joy comes from. I find that embedded in the doing.

Applied to fiber I've found materials that fit my meandering nature. I can go from wildcrafting to weaving in the space of a day. I can explore scientific journals for information on dyes or play with color and texture to mix a sukoshi batch or get me to a craft show and infect other folks with this notion of learning to do things from scratch. There is so much to explore here and I'm glad to have peers out there. I discover more and more every day. Artists and crafters and all the inbetweeners, too. I'm going to pick a side now, though, imagined yet unnamed consequences be damned. I'm an artist, a fiber artist. A process-based fiber artist specializing in eco-ethical methodology - if you want to get fancy. But artist works just as well.

I am rainbow-freaking-brite

 I think of what I do as art, even if the outcome looks like a bit of craftwork. I think it okay to be both, but in my heart I call my self an artist before I correct my inner monolog with 'artisan'.

Whatever I am, my work seems to be moving toward accepting how much I love the minutia of the process of building a finished piece.

To that end I'm building up the studio's supply of naturally dyed fiber, because the process gets stretched out more going that route. And because I like it when my actions reflect my values. The past couple of weeks have been focused on working through what dyestuffs I have on hand, stashed away in bottles and jars. Aspen liquor and black walnut tea from last year. Madder root and cherry bark. A dormant indigo vat brought back to life with yeast and sugar.

Last week I spotted lupins on a walk with friends up to the cemetery and went back the next day to gather enough to experiment with those, too. It's given more of a yellow than that gorgeous inbetweeny green I've seen other dyers get, but I'm glad to add them to my list of wildcraftables up here. I'm headed to the western slope this weekend and plan to bring back some big basin sage for a dye workshop I'm leading on the August 1st. Sages give off a yellow, too. but it's a brighter, acid sort of yellow that shifts to greens with copper or iron. It's one of my favorites.

Things are turning green, even up here at 9000'. I've been poking around looking for potential wildcrafting spots. So far I've found pokeberry thickets and plenty of sages. I'd love to ferret out some elderberry and some weld or wild woad. Despite how much I love it when I get there, getting my butt out the door is something I've spent a lifetime unperfecting. Having a dog who lives for hikes has paired nicely with counteracting that.

Oh! the rain. It does not stop, and sometimes it turns to snow. The rain kept messing with the kids plans to camp in the tent, which has now come to live permanently on the back porch. When their first break in the weather came they lasted about an hour before they tapped out and came back inside. They'd spooked themselves reading scary stories.

Now that I'm warping a full-sized loom I have waste yarn, which generally makes me sad.  But, as it happens, they are the perfect length for weaving bracelets. I plan to have several woven cuffs at this Saturday's farmer's market. They'll be crafted from either a colorway called Viola or Emma the Pink, the batch I was demo spinning at the first market. If you miss the market I also have a few at The Corner Studios in Lyons.

market preview

I have a ginormous Etsy update this week. Lots of hats and cowls and some yarn, too. I fell off the schedule wagon the past few weeks and had some catching up to do. All of these things will be at the Longmont farmer's market this Saturday from 8am to 1pm.

I've created about four colorways of natural dyed reclaimed, unsweatered yarn to take to market as well. These will be exclusive to that venue for a while until I figure out if it's worth it to add them to the line permanently. I'll also have a few short / seconds skeins in indigo if anybody wants to try them. If they turn out to be a winner I might go in for buying actual base yarn to dye up.

 I think I'm getting the hang of blue. I've read that tropical indigo is easier to work with than woad or japanese indigo and I don't know if that is true or if I was just less anxious about it this time around. It did seem to turn the fibers a more dramatic shade on the first dip, though. And it smells less rotty.

My sister sent along her Lendrum wheel and some other fun stuff with my parents when they came up to see the kids' play. I've been using it to spin up a few more batches for the farmer's market this weekend (eek). The bobbins are so much smaller, but it's also sturdier and faster than my wobbly Louet.

Anais already claimed one of these pots of salve. Scrawled her name on the lid with a sharpie and ran off with it. I wanted to add something small and not made of fluff to my line. A nice, melty all salve seemed like a good fit. The base is olive and sunflower oil solar infused with calendula, rosehips, comfrey and cardamom. Then I added st. john's wort oil, honey, vetiver, orange oil and just enough raw beeswax to firm it up. With this formula it's good for everything from dry skin and lips to small scrapes and bruises.

catkins, cat eggs, averting catastrophe

I can see signs of things waking up, even up here at 9000'. The aspens are spreading out their catkins, robins are starting to give the jays hell. We experimented with plant dyes on easter eggs this year. The kids especially loved how bright pink cabbage juice makes for blue and green. I wondered how much better they'd absorb dye if you hollowed them out and soaked them in vinegar or alum first.

Sometimes I take the scenic route when working with dyestuff. A while back my aunt and uncle
obliged my request for a few boxes of pruning leavings from the fruit trees in their orchard. After soaking this pot-full of the fruit wood twigs for a week I set them on the stove to steam one day and added yarn to the pot the next.  After a cold soak over another day or two I put it back on the stove and repeated the steaming. What had been a decent pale yellow deepened into an almost rusty ochre.

 And then I thought about adding iron water. So I did. Looking back now I wish I had left this first batch alone. But the resulting cool medium gray that developed on those middle skeins of silk is a color I've never gotten before. I keep thinking of things I'd like to knit them up as. With the weather warming I keep thinking of camping, fishing in the early morning hours and the perfect hiking hat. Maybe this one, or this?

fauna

The only thing I have to show for myself this week is a new Sukoshi. In my defense, it is spring break and there is a new addition to the menagerie. This batch is called Thessalonica. I have a habit of reading sci-fi and fantasy before bed and I couldn't get the catchy title out of my brain.

As for the growing number of fauna around here...this is Jasmine. While the kids were at their grandma's down in Denver, Gerry and I decided to go "window shopping" at the animal shelter. We got one of our cats there a few years ago and ever since moving into the house we've been flirting with the idea of finally getting a dog. So much for window shopping. She's either a Catahoula or a Plott Hound mix. Either way the consensus around here is she's a keeper.

I got to do some swapping this week, too. One of the other moms at school makes awesome outdoors-inspired jewelry. I picked out these two pieces, she wanted a woven cowl I had just finished. Remember when Etsy was a place for trading, too? When I first set up my shop I'd swap yarn for tote bags and schmancy lip gloss. I do trades at craft shows, too, but it's not something everybody incorporates into their business model. In case its not obvious by now, I emphatically do. I love it.

unsweatering

It was warm enough the other day to open the window and let Angie scheme about what she would do when she escaped to the outside again. When we first moved here last spring she managed to scramble up our bed and slipped out the broken screen. I had no idea until we ran into each other on the back porch. Ever since that day she's known she's being kept from all the fun and longs for a ferret ladder to an open window.

I'm toying with the notion of adding reclaimed, plant dyed yarn to the farmer's market booth. I keep an eye out for not-acrylic sweaters when we go thrift store shopping. It's a cheap, if labor-intensive way to add 1,000 yards to your stash. I've deconstructed a few this week and realized that they all seem to have a chirality to them, a handedness to the direction in which each garment was seamed together. Once I caught on to it I was able to break them down much faster and with less fear of wasting yarn by cutting the wrong bit.

 I love the range of colors you can get from rubia tinctorum, from pink to purple and even yellow. But, the next round of madder I buy is going to be chopped and not powder. It's such a pain in the dye bath. Either you let it free and it gets all over the fiber or you have to use a tea towel to strain it because anything with a looser weave will let it get all over everything anyway. If I had more patience it probably wouldn't even be an issue. This dye bath gave my a nice purple with pink highlights on a wool and cotton blend. The leftover bath is cold processing some lambswool skeins in a tucked away corner of the kitchen. So far they're a pale orangey pink.

the yay..uh oh

I felt pretty smug at the beginning of the week when I took this shot. My out box is nearly full, ready to deliver to shops and be listed on Etsy. Then I found out I had made it into the Longmont Farmer's Market this season. They do an art market add-on every fourth Saturday. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Doing a regular market has been one of my goals. But...suddenly my box felt kind of small. Really small, actually. I've been busy making ever since. Carding, spinning and weaving. I do love a deadline and the first market is at the end of April. 

Weaving may be my new favorite thing to do. It's soothingly meditative and goes by relatively quickly compared to knitting. The best part though, is that I feel like I've found an ideal way to show off the colors and textures in my handspun. It's kind of like creating a canvas and a painting at the same time. One of my goals is to have a pile of these for the first market.

 I don't want to get out of the habit of stocking my online shop, so I'm still going to list things on Etsy as I make them. One question that gets asked a lot is whether a given item on my table can be found elsewhere and generally I always mean to list things when I get home but rarely get around to it in a timely fashion. No more of that. This week I have batts, yarn and a woven scarf.

hawks & socks

A red tailed hawk was hanging out on top of the pole in our backyard for almost an hour last weekend. Things like this (and the moose that ambled through a few weeks ago) make me wish I had a telephoto lens. This week has been a getting things wrapped up kind of week. I finished off not one but two pairs of socks/slippers. I thrummed the slippers with about two batts worth of these. The socks just barely fit Toby. I tucked in the multitudinous ends of my first official woven scarf and rewarpped the loom for the next round. There was coffee with montessori moms that resulted in a tiny revolution. And, while I may not have anything to add to the shop I do have a lot of spinning to do after a marathon carding session.

almost not winter

Since last weekend I've mostly been starting seeds, tending the kombucha (its lavender blueberry this time), spinning and knitting. Around the house kinds of stuff. We recently got a foot or so of snow and I've been reluctant to wade out to the studio to do more weaving. My test project is off the loom so I need to rewarp it and start a new project, probably something wide with the chunky reclaimed cashmere yarn I dyed with woad this fall. I can see it as a soft cowl, maybe with leather closures.


 My first big order of seeds came in the mail. I'm trying to focus on perennials this year. Or at least things that will either reseed or overwinter. And more flowers. There were patches of toadflax around the backyard this summer so I'm going to try some heirloom linaria. It's basically the same plant, but in lots of colors. I've also got pansies and hollyhock and cosmos. The kids picked seeds out, too. They started a plot of their own down in the northwest corner of the yard. Anais wants to try white strawberries, litchi tomatoes and dragonfruit. That last one will probably be more of a houseplant, but it should like hanging out in the kitchen well enough.

All that puttering resulted in something to show for myself. I finished up three pairs of fingerless gloves and reserved four batts from a personal batch I made over the holidays. It has tons of yak and silk and when I soaked the first round of yarn it smelled like aspen leaves. All that means really, is that I finally have a proper shop update this week with knits and fiber batts.

weaving

I've had a floor/table loom for years. It belonged to Gerry's grandma and weaving has always seemed like such a good idea. The next logical step in my fiber craft education. But, between the hinky jargon and the misunderstood notion that it takes two people to warp one of these things, its mostly just sat around. Until last weekend. After watching a bunch of video tutorials and one adorable grandpa making rag rugs I finally set up the loom. I'm just doing plain weave and I put the floor treadle...things away because setting up the table loom side seemed easier to rig up. But I love it! I'm definitely going to be adding bigger woven items to the shop soon. Right now I'm doing what will probably become a mobius scarf out of some reserve Eat Agar that I've been holding on to for years now.
When I was still spinning OOAK skeins I would save ten or so yards from each for my own self. I could never find a project that seemed right for the 500 yards I ended up with. Weaving it all into one long, saori-esk scarf is what I was waiting for. It looks pretty amazing.

In order to feel like I was geeting more than just personal projects
done I simultaneously washed some wool and mixed up a few more Sukoshi batches. The jacob and merino wool turned out super soft. The suffolk got a wee bit felted as I was impatient toward the end and tossed in the dryer. It was set to cool, but the agitation did it in. It's salvageable but I'm probably going to save it for a dye day to redeem it a little. Spot's jacob went in with a bunch of woad dyed silk and alpaca along with teal and undyed hemp, auburn huayaca alpaca, a handful of yak and blue sparkle. Emma's merino became the base for alkanet dyed alpaca, seafoam bamboo and aspen dyed silk. There's some purple sparkle and yellow and plum flax in there, too. I'll be spinning up one or both batches this week.

 In unfibery news, I scored a broken birdfeeder at Home Depot for a penny (hooray for cashiers who take pity). Someone had dropped it, but all it needed was some glue and tape. I hung it out on the front porch, where the wind doesn't get too crazy and the chickadees found it a few days later.
I got this year's seed order done, too. It includes trees! Lots of trees! Trees for fruit and trees for chickens and trees for wind breaks and wildlife. It also includes a soil blocker, a toy I've been wanting to play with for a while now. And there are garlic sprouts in the cold frame, some of them are four inches tall and reaching up through their leafy blanket.

skillsharing

 This is the time of year I find myself knitting and knitting and knitting for craft shows. My goal is to have ten pairs of fingerless gloves on my table, among other things like hats and spinning kits and yarn. I just finished these gloves last night. They're extra long and all handspun. I'm tempted to keep them for myself, I like them so much. But then I'd have to make one more pair to meet my self-imposed quota. Meh.

 I decided to try and overwiner our tuscan blue rosemary. I'm not sure if it could have hacked the minus whatever-it-gets-to-here nights. It's flowering now and that generally makes me wonder if I'm making it happy or stressing out so bad that its making itself pretty in a desperate attempt at reproducing before it dies on me. I might try cutting it back a bit and making starts from the cuttings. I got the idea from this Juniper Moon Farms blog post.

 I've been making time to play with natural dyes lately, too. I'm brushing up because I'm teaching a yarn dyeing workshop with the Living Arts School on December 7th. The focus is on locally available dyestuffs, plants you could find growing wild plus a few you could easily incorporate in your own garden here in Colorado. I'll have a mix of prepared and whole plants and go over the various ways to tweak a dye bath to get more than one color/shade from each plant.

By way of example, here are some examples of a few of the dyes we'll be playing with. The browns are from black walnut hulls gathered in Wash Park in Denver. From left to right its been dyed onto tussah silk, hemp and alpaca. The pink(hemp) and orange(silk) are from the same bath of safflower petals. You can get a yellow from the same dye pot, too. The nice thing about safflower is that you can do the whole process cold.

This is from an indigo vat I've stashed in a corner by the stove. The fiber is silk that has been sitting in situ as the vat ferments and the gray-blue color has touches of red where the madder root took hold of the fiber, too. It's back in the vat and hopefully it'll get blue-er. I like the storm cloud quality of this stage too, though. The blue we will explore in the class will be more traditional, from woad and should produce a truer blue than this one.



 The jar is full of alkanet root that's been soaking in some Everclear that I found in the cupboard when we moved in. Alkanet isn't water soluble but alcohol will draw it out and create a deep purple/red color. This one doesn't exactly fit into the "local" rubric, but I'll probably bring some to the class anyway in case someone wants to try it. It gets used in natural cosmetics commercially and grows wild in Europe. It's a lot harder to find seeds for it here but I've seen them on Etsy now and again. This batch is currently evaporating out as I add snow to it so I can dye fiber in it without turning it into alkanet flambe.

black walnut

     I've got things in the works. Namely, a dye class in the first week of December and a craft show during the second, plus stocking up for Christmas Market in Georgetown. Which also means I have a whole lot of spinning and knitting and dyeing ahead of me.  Adding NaNiWriMo to all that was an awesome idea, too, right? It hasn't been all that difficult actually. It helps that I've been doing research for it for years now. And 1,700 words per day is not as impossible to get through as it seemed. My main concern is what happens when I run out of things to write about. Hopeful that won't happen before I get to 50,000.

     In between all the hands one stuff I have to get done I've added a few vats to work themselves out in the background. Here's a shot of the black walnut. It's as smelly as it looks. All those bubbles mean its fermenting which hopefully means its releasing a lot of dye compounds, too. Although with black walnut, I hear, a little goes a long way.

more tea, please

 I've got whatever sinus business that's been going around so this will be a less than ambitious Wednesday post.


These drop spindles have been selling better than anything I have ever put on Etsy before. It makes me wish they weren't a limited run. But I can't find any more of the painted filagree disks. Which probably means I'll just have to find a way to manufacture my own...

A few weekends ago I signed up to do NaNoWriMo. I heard some ladies talk about at a writing retreat a few years ago and put it in the back of my head to try out someday. Well, someday is in a few days and I may have only the barest scratch of an outline but I sure do have a purdy cover. That would be the S.S. Bill Murray in all his vintage glory right there. And yes, he will be an antagonist of sorts.

aspen & nettle

     The dye vats were calling to me after I finally finished a pair of custom gloves I've been sloooowly working on for the past few weeks.  I can't wait to show them to the person who asked for them. They're a longer version of the striped gloves I usually make for craft shows, but the requested yarn is also bulkier. This made them much warmer and makes me think more of hiking/biking than typing but they turned out beautifully all the same.

  
     The vats of aspen and nettle I have going are not beautiful. I let them ferment as they cold-process, leaving the dyestuffs in for as long as my nose can stand it. They've reached peak smelliness with that scuzzy mold on top. The nettle is the primary offender. The word putrid comes to mind before I even lift the lid. While that sucks for air quality in my kitchen, it also means that the pigments and the fiber are getting along famously. I finally cracked and cycled the first round of fiber out of the nettle and aspen this morning.

     I worked outside on the porch to minimize any lingering zombie stench, not to mention the mess. These chickadees were hanging out with me the whole time. Well, they were mostly hanging out in the aspen trees and the bird feeder. But, when I stopped for a bit to watch them one did get curious enough to investigate my shoes.



     Specific fibers interact with natural dyes in differing ways for lots of reasons. One thing I've noticed is that silk will take up color with vibrancy while wool is more subdued. This batch was a good illustration of that general rule. The silk and alpaca came out of the aspen bath dyed a bright acidy yellow and the hampshire wool came out of the nettle a pale sort of greenish yellow. There was still one more step. I started bottles of copper and iron tea last fall for afterbaths and mordanting.  This was my first opportunity to play with them. On the aspen-dyed silk and with the copper, at least, the effect was pretty magical. It went from that acid yellow to deep green. The nettle...eh. It was a deeper, kaiser green last year but then I also pretty much forgot about it for a month or two, leaving it in the closet. And I used scottish blackface wool, which takes up dye almost as greedily as silk does. Maybe I'll try that for round two.

From left to right, the aspen-dyed alpaca and silk with alum moradant, then iron afterbath and copper afterbath. The next photo is the nettle-dyed hampshire wool with the same progression: alum, iron afterbath, copper afterbath.