New Weaving

 I got a chance to work on the Jacquard loom last week to try some new designs with steel wire and rusting.  By allowing the steel wire to float in front of the piece in large sections I can control were the rust appears and stains the cotton.

Steel and Cotton. Woven on a Jacquard loom, then rusted. 40" x 28"

Capillary Action - Final installation shots

Its finally done!  It ended up being just over 11 feet wide, 9 feet tall, and took over 6,000 yards of yarn.

Here's a picture with me in front of it for scale.  As a side note: my dress was dyed at the workshop a couple weeks ago, which I blogged about here. It was a light yellow to begin with, and I over dyed it with Iron and Tea to give it this nice grey/green.

I leave Paducah tomorrow evening. Its been a great, busy, productive, fun month. While I'm excited to get back home to my kitties and a certain bearded fella, I will defnitely miss all my new friends and the lovely studio here!

Coming together

Getting closer, about 3/4 complete as of yesterday:

And the poster I made for my reception next week:

Day Whichever Progress (I've lost count)

Here's a Progress shot from a couple days ago, at from outside last night:

Another fun thing about the studio is there are always toads outside at night.  I almost stepped on this little guy when I went out to photograph.

Natural Dye Workshop

This weekend I hosted a natural dye demonstration/workshop in the A.I.R. studio here in Paducah.  On Saturday we started out by mordanting our fiber - treating it with Alum or Iron in order to help the fiber take up the dye and make the color more permanent.

Our fiber after they came out of the mordants.

We also cooked our dyes on Saturday, using local Blackberries, Black Tea, Brazilwood and Turmeric.

The dyestuffs

The dye baths

In order to keep the blackberry dye from going grey we didn't simmer our fabric in it, but let it sit overnight. On Sunday we dyed the rest of our fiber.  The participants were able to get a wide range of colors depending on the choice of the Alum or Iron mordant, the amount of time in the dye baths and the fiber they used.  Many people brought natural wool roving but we also had some silk scarves and some recycled material from wool coats.

The range of colors for each dye were:

                                Blackberry: Light purple to lavender to grayish purple

                                Tea: Warm tans to grays

                                Turmeric: Bright yellow to gold to brown

                                Brazilwood: Mauve to magenta to dark purple

Our dyed fabric drying outside

The two tones from the different mordants are easy to see in Tina's samples

Showing off the difference between silk and wool.

Georgia knotted her silk scarves before putting them in the
dye bath in order to get these beautiful textures.

Day 6 Progress

It's Growing...

Progress Report

Day 2:

Day 4: