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.

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?

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.

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.

intentions

     The month of January was for me time. Selfish knitting, a beer class with my mister, kombucha making, and generally hanging out around the house without the guilt of a to do list hanging over my head. It went by fast but toward the end I was missing the routine of work.
     Even though my stay-cation had a few days left last week, I started binge listening to indie biz podcasts like AIM and Tara Swiger's Explore Your Enthusiasm. It was so inspiring I ended up breaking out paper and pens to plan out my goals for the upcoming year. There's something about writing it all down that makes it real, attainable. Starting with the big stuff and breaking those down into 'actionable steps' transforms the conceptual into to doable. For me, anyway.

Here are my big goals for 2015:

~ take better care of my vendors. 

~ focus on what sells

~ experiment with a few others.

~ find a regular market to sell at

~ teach 

~ create a look book

~ publish something

personal goals:

~ 50 pairs of socks

~ yoga & archery

      I also wrote out my production timeline, the steps I take to get from raw fiber to finished object. Even though it lives in my head, it's a chattering beast. I have a habit of trying to do all the tihngs all at once which usually results in getting very little actually finished. I'm hoping that having it in hardcopy form will help me avoid vapor lock and stay on track. Structure = good.

    

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.

visiting

We went to visit family last weekend and brought home what's become a regular assortment of veg and dyestuffs. There were even a few immature cotton bolls to play with and a surprise patch of japanese indigo. The kids splashed around in the ditch and picked popcorn and ran around with the dog. Most of what came home has been eaten or processed by now. The tomatoes were roasted and canned up, the green beans were munched like edamame with leftover ham the first night we got home. There was even a baby ladybug that hitched a ride in the squash and got transplanted to an aphid-ridden artichoke I'm attempting to overwinter.

                                                 

The dyestuffs have been put to work now, too. All of these are hanging out in various canning pots and those giant pails you use for beer brewing, tucked into a corner of the kitchen to ferment and soak up the color. Some were heated beforehand to draw out the dye, some were not and some don't even have fiber in them yet because I haven't quite made it to that step. I'll get there...eventually. The only plant I haven't harvested yet is rabbitbrush. I'm not sure what I'd put it in, I seem to be out of large pots. Maybe I'll skip it this year, unless I run into a good patch of it out there. There's no shortage of it, but sometime soon it'll all have gone brown for the year. 

sales and sensibility

Proof that I am still alive and spinning. My daughter and I will be selling bath salts, lip salve and yarny stuff in Boulder in a few weeks. We are also going to be donating part of what we make to the Xerces Society, a group that raises awareness for invertebrate conservation. We found them after Anais put on a change jar fund raiser "For the Bees" at our then local library and needed to find a place to donate the proceeds to. I haven't decided yet about the amount, maybe 5% of sales?  I don't know if that's high or low or what but given what I usually make at these things it should end up being a respectable amount and that's what I am aiming for.

Changes are coming for my yarn, too. In the interest of streamlining and the development of reproducibility in my work (in some ways my evolution as an artisan has been all about me fighting this aspect of best business practice) I am toying with the idea of shifting to straight up colorways instead of limited run micro-batches with individual names. One unexpected side-effect of our moving from the apartment to a house in the woods has been that my precious routine has been shattered. Little things have become big stumbling blocks despite the fact that I now have a whole studio to myself. Making my process as automatic as I can is what builds the momentum that gets the job done.

Blah, blah, blah. What this really means is that I'm having a sale on the micro-batch Sukoshi. I'm reducing them from $20 to $15 per skein at this upcoming show. I'm also going to have a pattern to give away with each purchase. Probably for those stripey fingerless gloves that I can never keep on the table at these things.

The battification of a batch

The paucity of words continues, but here's a batch of Sukoshi being processed in the drum carder. It's a remake. The third generation of 'Girl Sailor'. The first batch was demo spun during the Georgetown Christmas Market, the second went into the Denver Art Museum order. This third one is coming along to the fall Firefly market and then to Paonia if I have any left.

The first, second, third and final rounds through the drum carder. Resulting in a tame, fluffy batt of (mostly) cooperative fibers.

The finished product can sometimes surprise me. Fibers and colors conspire to let one shine through while others take a backseat. It doesn't always turn out how I expect it to. The funny thing is, these guys usually let me know what their name is during the carding stage. They change their mind from time to time, but always during the mixing and smoothing out of the batting and (almost) never during the spinning. Its like this is the part when they really gel, becoming an artifact onto themselves and the rest-the spinning, the setting of the twist, the knitting or weaving or crafting- is pure being on the yarn's part. As much as yarn can purely be, I suppose.

Thank yous

Last week we finagled our way over to the Western Slope to harvest some of the Japanese Indigo my grandparents were growing for me (thanks, grandparents!). Getting there turned out to be an adventure. Both of our cars' brake systems stopped working by the time we were supposed to head out there and my mom ended up driving up just to drive us back to Grand Junction the same day. And then, after the indigo project and a trip to the Mesa with the Grandparents Holton, she drove us home. (Thanks, Mom!)

This was my first attempt at growing my own dyestuff from seed and I've been psyching myself out a little. There are just so many steps to it and alkaline dyebaths seem to be a little more chemically than more acidic ones. Plus, there is that whole thing where I try to read directions, I really do (sometimes), but in the middle of everything I tend to just go for it and hope for the best. That works for me about 90% of the time. The rate of success tends to go down the more steps there are and this indigo process has quite a few. In fact, in the future I think I'll be taking a combined note from India Flint and Rebecca Burgess and use fermentation vats. There are fewer steps, bran and corn syrup aren't nearly as icky as Spectralite and heat doesn't play quite so big a role.

Everything turned out fine, if a little pale. Next time I'll know better than to stuff so much fiber in the pot. And to slow the heat down somehow...my Dad lent me one of those propane powered set-ups you use for deep-frying a turkey and it was actually pretty perfect for dyeing on the road. I also claimed one of the old camping backpacks he had in the garage. And a tent. And discovered he has a polishing tumbler thing that might come in handy if I do end up making my own copper toggle clasps for woven cuffs. He caught me eyeballing it and said I could bring the clasps to him if it came to that. Thanks, Dad!

The kids are still asking about when when we'll go back to the cabin. It's my Uncle Milo's (Thanks, Milo!) set up a little ways up Grand Mesa on some property my Dad's parents own. They've had plenty of rain so there were lots of mushrooms and, to the kids' delight, frogs! Not to mention mud. Toby lost his shoes shortly after breakfast. I found a bonus crop of stinging nettles in the woods to toss into the dyepot when we got home. I have scabs on my hand from the itchy blisters they gave me as I was picking them, but (thanks to all that rain?) they hadn't flowered yet and the color looks pretty deep so far.

All weekend I felt supported and encouraged by my family. I usually do on trips back home. We aren't a touchy-feely bunch of people, generally speaking, but actions speak louder sometimes and I feel really lucky to have them all in my life, putting up with my black sheepy ways.

Plant-dye thriftscore

 

 

 

With spring finally asserting itself up here I've been cracking open my natural dye books and keeping my eyes open for ones I can't live without. I found an obscure spiral-bound beauty at the coffee shop & used bookstore down the street for a few dollars. It's one of those government extension office publications on the topic of what to replant in disturbed or stressed BLM and park areas. Which means its basically a guide book for a surprising number of plants that are useful as dyestuffs, on public land no less. Black walnut, rabbitbrush, sage, aspen, etc. Besides all of the diagrams it also has a section on each plant for its ideal habitat and associated species. I love the idea of having more than just photos as a visual reference and its uber-sciency, to boot. Plus it's pages are just begging for notes to be scribbled on them.

I have a sage dye pot going from clippings I brought home from grandpa and grandma's. I think the smell of sage is one of my happy places, now. Grandpa kindly agreed to try and grow some Japanese indigo for me. If I had more space of my own I'd like to think I'd create a polycultural dye garden, but as it is I barely have space for my tiny cold frame and pallet herb garden thing. So thank goodness for indulgent relatives.

 

Formulaic

 

I had a few firsts this last week. My first custom yarn order, which necessitated my first attempt at intentionally recreating a couple of colors. It's a task I had ever really considered before. The thing is, I have these color formulas I use for the low-impact synthetic dyes. I keep them written down on a few dye-stained pages in my master notebook. They're little bits of arithmetic for the colors I've come to use over and over. It's kind of like having my own personal pack of crayons, some with names I've given them myself. Names like rusty grape or broken black. But for all the times I've used them it never occurred to me to notice how close one batch has been to another. Variation is kind of built into the process. In fact I love being able to invite chaos in. The surprises generally outweigh the frustration and I know of no better way to learn something new than to just leap and take notes as I go along. Different fibers take up dyes at different rates and saturations and I have a habit of putting random combinations of fibers in the jars with each round of dyeing. So color me surprised when I got both colors I needed on the first try! I guess from now on I'll have to admit that, while I feel letting chaos into my process is essential, it's a controlled sort of chaos...with compulsory sparkles.