Twisp of Fate

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I got back from another wonderful week on Orcas Island, immersed in spinning and dyeing with Judith MacKenzie and about 20 participants.  For the third year in a row, I have gone over with 2 friends from the valley.  Somehow we manage to squeeze our spinning wheels, tools, fiber, personal belongings and ourselves into my Honda CR-V and journey across the mountains and onto the ferry at Anacortes.  There you are, you know who you are!

The theme this year was “Colorful Ewe” and this meant exploring many ways to bring color into our spinning, with and without a dye pot.

On the first day we each chose a bag of “scrap fiber” that Judith had put together – bits of spinning fiber, both commercial and JM-dyed, mostly wool or wool/silk blends.  We were asked to spin a singles, using whichever method worked for the fiber prep, and changing colors fairly often.  Ideas of what to do with the singles:  (1) ply off multiple bobbins to even out the color and diameter, (2) spin to the left and then make a boucle onto a silk or rayon thread, then make a compound boucle in the opposite direction, (3) ply with a solid color.  I chose the latter and she had merino top in a variety of colors to work with for the solid.

My bag of “scrap” fiber

Finished the skein after returning home

On Day 2 she laid out a circle of dyed merino tops (see photo above) to show us a technique for making a marled yarn from 5 colors.  You hold 3 of the colors at a time across your hand and spin back and forth, from side to side, making sure to spin 2 colors together for a bit at each transition.  Then drop one of the colors and add in a new one at the other side.  You can make a 2-ply, and optionally overtwist the 2-ply to make a cabled yarn to get even more color mixing.  I have done this exercise in the past so skipped it (worsted spinning also not being my strong point…) but she did suggest lashing the 3 colors onto mini-combs to open up the fibers and make it easier to hold for spinning, if it is a struggle.

This day she also had us do an over-dyeing exercise to explore “The Harmony of Dominant Hue”.  We made pigtail bundles of a variety of commercial yarns (different colors and textures but all  protein fibers) that absolutely did not go together!  They set up mason jars with different dye colors to drop our bundles into for overdyeing.

JM’s samples – all were the same yarns

Project underway

A bonus of this exercise for me was the dye left in the mason jars.  I had brought some washed mohair locks that I wanted to dye in various colors and small quantities, to use in drumcarding wool batts for color and fiber accents.  So I got them soaking in a bucket and later that evening we dropped them into the jars and surrounding cookers.  I also did some later over in the “dye cabin” using up leftover dyepots, and by the end of the workshop I had a nice variety of colors.

Over the next couple of days, Judith also gave us lots of information and samples from lichen dyeing, and we compiled a little notebook with her notes, lichen samples and dyed yarn samples.  I didn’t get any pictures but it was very informative.

Another color exercise was making your own gradient yarn from a multicolor hand-dyed braid, instead of just spinning the color sequence the dyer had created.  She broke the braid up into color groups, from dark to light.

Then split the piles in half and spun 2 singles from dark to light.  When plied in the same order, the 2-ply is your own gradient created from the colors of a braid you loved for the color.

Here’s mine laid out and then the finished yarn.  I added a bit of solid colored merino to augment the color/shade sequence (especially the lemon yellow at the end).  This was fun and I can see doing it again with a full 4-oz or so braid (we only had about 1 oz to play with).

The other dye project I had in mind was to dye some fine 25-micron wool skeins (merino type) to use for weaving.  This we wound up doing in a steam table, and as usual I hovered and Judith worked her magic for me.  I wanted a “semi-solid” effect, i.e. not stripes of color across the skeins, and as it turned out we also got a gradient of color from skein to skein.  We were using Judith’s dyes (weak-acid super milling dyes for protein fibers) and we used lots of vinegar to make sure the colors struck fast and didn’t migrate around and make a mud pie in the dye bath.  She gently poked and lifted the skeins with a chopstick to make sure there were no “white spots” and that the dye worked its way down through all the fiber.

Pre-soaked and laid lengthwise and side-by-side in the steam table tray

Starting to add color at one side

Each one had a transition from the previous one and then went into a new color

My beautiful finished skeins!

It may be a while, but you will see these show up in scarves and/or shawls.

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I spent last week on Orcas Island at “spinning camp” with Judith Mackenzie.  Like last year, I went with 2 friends from the Methow.  We somehow managed to get 3 spinning wheels and our personal luggage into my Honda CR-V, and did our grocery shopping up on the island (they give us one meal a day at lunchtime, but we are on our own for breakfast and dinner, and the cabins have kitchens).

3 Methow gals at camp

Judith in the meeting room

The theme this year was “Let’s Spin It Right”.  Basically she gave us a lot of different kinds of fibers to spin and showed one or more ways to make the best use of it. Her new book is out and I would say a lot of things we tried drew on the book.  I did buy a copy as there is a lot of great info in there, not just about the various fibers.

The first day she gave us 2 oz. of 60% Polwarth/40% silk roving she had dyed.  I wound up buying a second one in a close but more blue color and over the course of the next day or two made this 2-ply yarn which I will use for a lace project:

That day we also played around with spinning silk and ways to combine it with other fibers.  She had just received some beautiful darkish red eri silk from India.  She showed us a way she had just come up with to combine it with yak fiber.  The yak has quite a short fiber length and the silk is much longer, but she laid a light “frosting” on top of the yak and just added some in occasionally.  The final effect is a gilded yak singles that you can ply.  My sample is so small it isn’t worth photographing (and I need to practice to get it to look better!) but I was quite excited by this idea and intend to pursue it.

She gave us some washed camel undercoat which has all the lengths of fiber, the shorter of which are lost when it is made into top.  You can spin this directly, but she also combined it with silk on handcards, which requires cutting the longer silk fiber into shorter lengths.  I brought that project home with me as I am not that good with handcards and want to take my time.

They set up the dye cabin towards the end of the week and I did a fair amount of dyeing this year.  Several folks were interested in gradient dyeing of skeins of yarn.  This involves starting with a low water level, then gradually lowering the fiber into the bath as you add more water.

From home I had brought 8 oz of 60% Polwarth/40% silk roving and Judith helped me dye it in the steam table tray.  Basically I assisted and she did the colors!

She has so many years experience she can just pour the dye stock solutions on and get wonderful results.  The challenge for me will be doing this on my own and not making a total mud pie out of it.  But look at my beautiful roving!

I also did some immersion dyeing of 6 skeins of wool I bought at camp in 2007 from Island Fibers on Lopez Island.  Maxine always brings her wares (whole fleeces, dyed rovings, undyed rovings, etc) to camp.  They had sent Lopez-Island-raised Coopworth and Romney fleeces to be spun into yarn and after 8 years I had done nothing with it and it was still white.  Now with Judith’s help it is a lovely moss green and I have started swatching for a sweater.

It was another inspiring and informative camp with our lovely Judith, teacher and mentor extraordinaire.

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I spent last week up on Orcas Island at “spinning camp” with Judith MacKenzie – my 4th time at this event (I missed 2009).  This year’s theme was “Bringing Color into Your Spinning”.  They were set up to do a lot of dyeing outdoors (always a bit iffy in February in NW Washington).  Then it snowed.  And got really cold.  But our organizers managed to score an indoor space in an adjacent cabin to the meeting room, swathed it in tarps to protect the furnishings, and we pressed on!

The first day Judith entertained us with stories of her trip to Peru in November 2010.  She was one of the speakers at Tinkuy de Tejedores (A Gathering of Weavers) near Cusco.  She brought back some beautiful textiles, all nature dyed handspun and woven on primitive backstrap looms.  She also shared a portion of her collection of Peruvian “burial dolls” – many of them very, very old.  They are not really dolls, but religious or ceremonial objects.  The clothes they wear are made from fragments of cloth that were originally on mummies, so in some cases the textile fragments could be thousands of years old.

Judith with burial dolls

The first class project was to spin a boucle yarn using a rayon core and kid mohair locks that Judith had dyed.  I skipped this one, as I have tried it before, am really bad at it, and know I won’t be pursuing this one any time soon.

Next she had us spin up some Corriedale rovings in white and black (natural colors) and make a series of 3-ply yarns: 3 white plies, 1 white/2 black, 2 white/1 black, 3 black.  Then we overdyed the final skein(s) with a color of our choice to see how the color interacts with the underlying makeup of the yarn.  Or this would be a way to make a graduated color yarn as you transition from white to black.  Mine came out sort of “sea lettuce green”:

After they got the dye area set up, we were able to dye solid colors in big dye pots on the cabin front porch, or go inside where they had 4 electric roasters set up to dye variegated color rovings or yarn with a direct pour application.  Each of us were given 4 oz of Corriedale roving, chose a colorway, then Judith dyed it for us while we observed the technique.  After everyone had done one roving this way, we were able to do more on our own (with her help with the colors, “if needed” – ha ha, always needed…)

my first dyed roving

Another spinning exercise: we were given 4 oz of Corriedale roving that Judith had already dyed (variegated in color like the one above).  Then we were encouraged to “share and share alike” by getting small amounts of other colors from other folks in the room.  The idea was to introduce other colors into the spun singles, in either a random or semi-methodical way, to obtain a final plied yarn that is more complex in color than if you had spun up just the single colorway represented by your roving.  This was a lot of fun and I like the idea a lot.  I finished plying mine when I got back home but I don’t have a picture of the final yarn yet and here it is:

The basic roving was quite muted, cream through shades of greyish purple, but I introduced short sections from another roving from time to time: dark royal blue through purple, and a brighter turquoise color.  I spun all the singles, divided it into thirds by weight, and made a 3-ply yarn where all the colors just come and go randomly.  I am pleased with the result and will probably use this idea again.

I also spun up some Polwarth roving that I bought from Maxine of Island Fibers on Lopez Island, at the event.  I made about 150 yds of 3-ply and it is wonderful, springy and soft yarn.  I will definitely be spinning more of this fiber.  I dyed it in one of the roasters along with some merino/tencel roving I also bought from Maxine.  Can you say RED?

Here are two more batches of dyed merino/tencel roving:

The one on the left was supposed to have more purple tones in it, but as it turns out this was superwash merino and it takes up dye very quickly.  It all just sort of blended together.  But I can put it back in a dye bath at home and try to modify it some, and I will.

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