Shibori with Yoshiko Wada: I

I should be stitching my homework for tomorrow's class but I am too excited and needed to share.

I am lucky enough to get a place at the Shibori workshop with Yoshiko Wada, organised by Leanne from Kimono House. There are 12 of us and today, we learnt to do fold & clamp and some of the stitching techniques.

Yoshiko and Leanne had prepared a synthetic indigo dye bath for this workshop and we all had a chance to dip our samples into that today.

What was so exciting for me was to learn how to do these tying and stitching properly and effectively.

miura (loop binding) - tied

miura - untied

Note: the top 2 rows are demonstrated by Yoshiko and the bottom 2 rows are mine. You can see how even hers are, all in a straight line where as mine are all different sizes and a bit random.

spiderweb - tied

spiderweb - untied

I would like to get a sample for ori-nui (fold & stitch) done tonight. Tomorrow, we will move on to do arashi-patterned cloth (pole-wrapped).

Pink!?

It is mid-winter but my peach/nectarine tree is already in full bloom. Maybe because it is in a pot and has a warmer micro-climate. I hope that it will survive the rest of the season and bear fruit this summer.

Seeing these blooms and recently using up that 'green' yarn, reminded me of this scarf I wove a couple of years ago. A friend wanted something special for her mother's birthday and said that she liked pink. My first thought was 'a pink scarf? I can't do something that is all pink!?' Then I saw the blossoms and thought about the colours that tied in with pink in nature. I broke them down into the pinks, the browns and the greens. This made me feel more comfortable with the idea of weaving something 'pink'.

Initially, I  could not find a green yarn commercially that worked with the other colours. In the end, Barb introduced me to dyeing small quantity of yarn in the microwave. This resulted in that 'green' yarn.

I wound all the different colours in a group and then randomly distributed them. This prevented a rigid pattern of stripes and worked well with a broken twill pattern. It was all 'Bendigo Classic 2ply wool' except for the pink silk yarn that also gave it a highlight sheen.

The scarf was well received and I was happy that I achieved the brief of 'pink'.

Winter Garden

Thanks to my green thumbed friends, there are some beautiful things to enjoy this winter.

Freesia

Freesia buds

 

Michelia

Snowdrops

And a bountiful harvest of these golden coccoons:

Fortunella margarita, or the Nagami kumquat

Black and White

Can you believe that it has been 5 months since this warp has been sitting on my loom? Yep, since February! This year is flying by and I honestly am not sure where the time has gone.

This is a colour and weave (yes Kaz, it is black and white - they are colours!?) practice warp (and it has become a full scarf sample) and I had actually forgotten how long the warp was when I decided to stop weaving. I should have checked the blog post! If I did, I would not have gone into a panic and thought that I had not allowed enough for some other bits of sampling I really wanted to do! 

The woven length prior to finishing was approx 150cm. I was happy with that, but I had forgotten to allow for the shrinkage after wet finishing. It shortened to 140cm...... Well, it is still long enough to wear but not enough to loop around twice nor to double up and thread through.

It was great having this project on KaTe (the 8 shaft coutermarche floor loom). It gave me a chance to get to know the loom, to try out something that demanded a balance weave and to admire the overhead beater that almost does the work on its own. The beautiful solid piece of timber that carries its own momentum in its weight makes the beating a breeze.

The foot treadles also made this 50-pick repeat so easy compared to the table loom, and so much faster!

I love my fringe twister gadget from Leclerc. I would not have been able to bear doing all those twists without it. It helps with consistency and speed.  

Ruffling with the knitting machine

Yesterday I helped out Christine at the MAKV stand at the Craft and Quilt show, with some demostration of handmanipulation techniques.

Very simple one, just lifting some stitches from a few rows below to the current row and knitted them together.

I used a 'Brother' machine. A very simple machine that only did stocking stitch and any variations are by tension change or hand-manipulation.

The effect reminded me of the curly seaweed that you get at Japanese restaurants! well, especially in this colour.

This is made of 2 ply Bendigo Woollen Mill 'classic' wool and I dyed this colour with Barb. We used acid milling dye and the microwave.

It also satisfied my search for various methods of creating ruffle effect with machine knitting. More on this obsession in another post.

Pics to Picks

As per the previous post, I decided to use the cotton warp left over from the ikat workshop. I also found another black cotton warp from a previous project of the same yarn type. What luck!

Then I got thinking, what about a double weave. I delibrated between a double weave where I can form folds on the upper layer and possibly with a twill weave structure and a plain weave on the bottom layer or this interlocking  structure as per the diagram below. (from the book on Doubleweave by Ursina Ann-Grishott)

Since they were already 2 separate warps, I wound them onto 2 beams. This will also give me the flexibility of re-threading and trying out something else if I did not want to keep with this idea.

The book also has a very good explanation of how the threading and treadling works:

I had cut the ikat warp in half and used the 2 parts to create a contrast at the vertical intersection and to make it a wider piece.

The ikat warp is slightly wider and will slightly extend beyond the black layer. For both layers, the weft will be the same black cotton. This is reminiscent of the texture of the canvase in the image.

I would have liked to at least started weaving to see if what I envisaged would work, but this is as far as I got.......

How things can change......

I was having a discussion with Michelle about how many things I have on my plate when I decided to actually get all those things out so that I can see them: then it is not just a list in my head that has grown out of proportion. I started rumaging in my yarn boxes to see what i can use for the pics to picks project.

What a co-incidence or how lucky can I be? you may recall how I mentioned that colour is not my strong point but I am working on it.......

This is a painted warp left over from the ikat workshop with Kaz. In fact, I have a suspicious feeling that this is the demonstration warp she did!

The colours are perfect!

So now the ideas for this picture has evolved. It is no longer a clasp weft structure but some sort of twill/plain weave/repp weave type structure.

When I examine the picture closely, I can see the texture of the canvase amongst the colours. I think that it will have a black weft.

Time will tell what it will become.......