madder, indigo, persimmon, cloth

Knitted mitts in variegated wool, on a bowl of hemp yarn dyed with indigo and madder at The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble, WA. My mitts, and yarn that was mine as soon as I paid for it.

So why all this knitting and spinning and weaving and sewing and stuff? Well yes, handmade clothes and fabrics are wonderful, but the truth is, many of us do this because we love handling the materials. Fiber, yarn, and cloth are sources of discovery and wonder, and so we’re forever coming up with new ways to explore with them and through them.

Ending up with reliable results is a sign that we are gaining in knowledge and skill, but getting there is often most of the fun - including the dreaming stage, the beholding of some material that compels us, either ineffably or viscerally. The Japanese shirting was doing that to me. Both the ochre version from which I made my petticoat, and this striped blue and neutral. They kept talking to me, insistently, requiring that I pay attention to them. I realized the striped one reminded me of indigo and persimmon, natural dye colors that are commonly seen in Japanese textiles.

I bought a remnant, again (when I can’t think of a concrete project for a fabric, I wait for it to be a remnant, then bring it home as a pet.) This sat in my basket, on view, for a while. Here it is with a Japanese indigo dyed piece my husband bought me while we lived in Japan (late 1990’s). It is loosely woven asa fabric - asa is a generalized term for native plant fibers, from what I can tell. The base yarn is colored with persimmon (kaki) and overdyed with indigo, in a way that involves folding and dipping.

Striped Japanese shirting and indigo/persimmon dip-dyed plant fiber cloth, detail.

Large scarf made of plant fiber dip-dyed with tapered horizontal stripes of indigo in alternating light and dark tones. Creased from being folded….

I found that I had enough for a sleeveless bodice, and began looking for a skirt. Enter one more beloved Thai sarong. This is apparently the year for me to use my Thai sarong fabrics. I wore this one quite a bit. It was a functional garment already, and had been sewn into a tube. When I put it next to the Japanese shirting and knew they belonged together, it struck me that this fabric also had a natural dye referent - it reminds me of madder and indigo. It’s not even a true batik, just a print, but I suspect that people dye and print commercial fabrics with colors that are traditionally pleasing, consciously or unconsciously hearkening back to natural dyes.

Print sarong, showing underside. Intricate batik-style patterns in shades of pink/brown and indigo blue, with black and white highlights.

Button band of sewn bodice, with 19th century China buttons in blue and white. These are my first machine sewn buttonholes, ever.

I don’t have to go far to find examples of madder and indigo among my fibers and fabrics. They are my favorites, and make their way into the stash with ease.

Madder-dyed wool spinning in progress, on a Peruvian spindle. I dyed the fiber in a workshop with Local Color Fiber Studio of Bainbridge Island. The weaving underneath I made with my rigid heddle loom, two shades of indigo cotton from Laos.

Working with these colors and fabrics is the joyful part - placing them next to each other, seeing how they communicate and what they have to tell me. Being able to wear what I make with the fabric, practicality meets delight. I made a sleeveless Hinterland dress which may serve as an undergarment until it gets warm out again.

Detail of dress, Japanese striped shirting on top, China buttons, Thai sarong on the bottom. Soothing blue and muddy cinnamon….

Another example of persimmon (painted onto stencil paper for use in stitch resist dyeing) and indigo (handmade paper made and dyed by Laura Mayotte.)

Natural colored flax yarn, spun by me, indigo dyed hemp yarn from Rainshadow Fibers, a Japanese bag made from plant fiber and dyed with indigo and possibly persimmon, but maybe walnut, underneath.

I’ve done that thing again, where I write about another topic and put it on a different page. Still thematic to the textile riches of my life, a contemplation of a camel trapping in the threads page.

bamboo reeds, continued

Bamboo reed in progress in the dorm room at UVic.

I left the reed half-constructed in the previous post, but it was finished within the three-day workshop, I love how it looks like something maritime while on the stand, with its twin masts and hanging bobbins. There was a scary moment when Bryan discovered a problem with the width, but he corrected it with some selective pounding. Soon enough I had a finished reed!

Don't try this at home. Bryan hammers the bobbin against the bound string to correct a widening problem. Then he showed us how to measure to make sure this doesn't happen.

Bryan double checks and admires the work of an early finisher, before taking the reed off the stand.

My reed, finished and awaiting shoji paper along the edges.

When I got home I immediately cleared the deck to weave with it, rummaging in my weaving yarn bin to find the right warp. I chose an undyed cottolin a friend had given me, and found some handspun for weft.

I wound a long warp, more than 3 meters. When I first tied on, I had to open the door behind me in the photo, and sit in the closet. Some astute observers may be thinking that those two balls don't look like much weft, and that is correct. I was so eager to get started, I didn't even think of measuring for weft, and they were already wound in balls without recorded yardage anyway (I had the idea I would ply them with something else eventually), so I plunged in with about three bobbins' worth of weft. Needless to say, I had to spin more as I went along. But I was weaving! With my handmade reed! Longer, finer, and wider than most of my backstrap weaving so far.

Somehow the fabric felt Japanese. The width is similar to kimono cloth, but the use of this tool seemed to put the whole project into a certain cultural mode. I always like the state of mind I have while weaving, but this time it was even more transformative. Bryan had talked about the Japanese aesthetic and the deep roots of the mindset, and I felt tapped in to the sense of making "egoless cloth" with this piece.

The end result feels Japanese to me, too, in an intangible way. I'm grateful to Bryan for helping me access this way of weaving. Although I spent three years in Japan, I was not able to engage with textile making in that context, so it has been elusive for me.

Meanwhile, I went to work on another, smaller reed. We had enough supplies to make a second reed of 8 inches or so. I set this up and tied it slowly, relishing the process. I very much like doing the work of making this tool.

I carved the nearer pair of binding rods myself - they're rough but they worked.

The second one ended up with about the same dent (22 epi), wide enough for 8 inches of weaving. I hope to to some sakiori with this one, using my stash of kimono silks as weft.

Oh, and by now I have my second large piece on the loom with the wider reed. It's handspun wool warp & weft, only about 2 meters long this time, and less than 12 inches wide (I measured the yarn this time.)

Work in progress. Handspun wool two ply warp, singles weft.

bamboo reeds

Antique reed from Japan, one of Bryan's samples

I took a pre-conference workshop at ANWG in Victoria BC at the end of June. Bryan Whitehead came from his home in a silk farming town outside of Tokyo to teach us how to make bamboo reeds for weaving. He brought all the materials, and had spent more than a year preparing them for us.

Workshop materials: whole Aodake, higo strips, blocks of hinoki for supporting reeds-in-progress, and packets of prepared reeds.

The Aodake (type of bamboo) is split and peeled progressively from the whole chunk, about 5-6 cm diameter, to the narrow higo strips used for basketry. These strips are then cut to size for reeds. Each individual reed is about 9 cm long, 4 mm wide and 0.4 mm thick, with beveled edges (the length is variable, the width and thickness uniform because that's important for consistency in the finished tool.) All of Bryan's students received packets of 330 of these small pieces to make our reeds. The amount of effort that went into preparing them is astounding: before the bamboo is even cut, it is dried for months, cured over a fire to release oils, and dried some more. During the first day of our workshop, Bryan demonstrated the methods of splitting and peeling bamboo, and beveling and planing the higo. It looked smooth and easy as he worked, but when we tried we found that doing it right is tricky and difficult.

Splitting the bamboo in half with a machete, after making initial cuts in the top.

Peeling off the outer 1/3 of a 1cm strip. The inner bit will be discarded.

Throughout the workshop Bryan gave us the historical, cultural, and aesthetic context of bamboo, weaving, and cloth in Japan. Since I'd lived in Japan years ago, it was nice to re-immerse in this world, and memories of the place and the language came to the surface of my mind. The block of wood we used as a stand for reed building is made of hinoki, a type of cedar used in Japanese baths. The smell evoked onsen, hot springs, one of my favorite aspects of living in Japan, and I kept happily inhaling the distinctive scent as I worked. I'm grateful that we got to keep the wood. Bryan didn't just bring us a technique - he brought as much of a cultural experience as he could to the physics lab on the UVic campus. When people attend workshops in his home, they're surrounded by the indigo and tea fields, the bamboo forest, and centuries-old silk weaving houses. It was challenging for him to translate both the terminology and the experiences into English, but he succeeded - probably because he's spent the last 30 years bridging cultures.

Antique reeds from Japan that Bryan showed us, pointing out the details we would learn as we made ours.

Our class was unusual for a weaving conference, and more than one weaver asked me why I was making a reed. As a backstrap weaver, I've been seeking this kind of tool-making skill and knowledge for a while, but to most weavers using floor looms, it's not necessary. For this reason, our class was a group of people with interests slightly outside the norm for North American weavers. We were remarkably harmonious, and many in the group have a strong urge to travel to Japan for further study with Bryan sensei.

More to come on what we actually did, and where it has led me.