Felting Workshop

Today I taught a felting workshop at the Pegg Garden … it was a load of fun!

These lovely artists created felted vases … so many different colours!

I did a quick intro, then worked on a demo vase while everyone had lunch … it was like dinner theatre but with soap and water and wool. (Mine’s the one on the far right with the thistle on it.) Everyone started their creations after seeing how it was done, and we had a lot of fun seeing everyone’s felting take shape. It starts out as this weird lump of soggy wool, and ends up as a shaped vase that stands up on it’s own!

Look, this one is shaped like a pitcher.

My parents are here visiting from Ontario, and my mom came to the workshop with me today, which was really awesome. She arranged all the sample vases with flowers and greenery … the County Horticuluralist, Lorraine (on the right) cut the greens and Mom (on the left) did all the arrangements.

Look how pretty they are!

It was really fun.

When I came home, Dad and The Boy had been cutting deadwood out back – more firewood for winter, and less of a mess in the back!

Look at all that!

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a lovely day.

More Beautiful Than Before: the project is a go!

It’s official … the next book has reached the final draft and we are ready to move into production!

Because this book is available not just as a single, standalone book but also as part of a kit, the up front costs are a bit higher than with my previous projects, putting it a little beyond “oh, just put it on the credit card and we’ll pay it off as orders come in”.

As a result, we are using Kickstarter to accept preorders of the book (as well as other forms of sponsorship, all of which come with some kind of tangible reward, from a small download to an e-book up to and including a full kit and having your name on the acknowledgements page!).

What’s the book about? Well, here’s a look at the back cover:

You can find out more by following the link to Kickstarter and watching the video there, there’s also a full explanation of all the various ways you can support the project (and get your copy reserved!).

If you are interested in the one-day workshop based on this book, let me know! I’ll be ready to offer those by early summer. Just leave a comment below, ping me on Ravelry, or send me an email!

Dyeing in the Garden

We had a lovely day at the Pegg Garden today, dyeing yarn and silk scarves with locally sourced materials.

Fourteen people showed up to play with colour and fibre, and we had beautiful sunny weather for our experiments. I had spent the last couple of weeks preparing dye baths: wood chippings and amur cherry and apple tree prunings (helpfully provided by George Pegg Garden staff), grass clippings (provided by The Boy), thistle and tansy (harvested by me from the ditch), and onion skins and frozen flowers (also provided by the Garden).

The frozen flowers were bundled into a silk scarf before everyone arrived and set to steam, then we chatted about dyeing with plants, and got our yarn into the water baths. We got lovely colours from everything this year!

Then we had our lunch, followed by a tour of the garden led by our intrepid County Horticulturalist, who told us about the kinds of plants we can grow here and showed us samples of many of the ones we were using for dyeing growing right there in the Garden.

While we walked, we harvested materials for the silk scarf dyeing, and then everyone made patterns on their silk and rolled it into a sausage for steaming. We didn’t have enough time to get everything thoroughly steamed, but people could take them home and finish the steaming or leave the bundle to sit for a few days or weeks until the colour develops.

(Yes, that’s a baby sleeping on a blanket under the umbrella. She was an adorable little angel, didn’t cry once the whole day!)

Our yarns came out in fabulous shades – I didn’t get enough pictures, but it really did turn out great. I have more dye bath liquids here at home and some fibre I need to dye for a weaving project, so you’ll be seeing samples soon. The amur cherry prunings gave a really lovely reddish gold that I hope to get more of, and the grass clippings gave more colour than I expected, too! A nice rich brownish green.

I have one more silk scarf steaming now, the one I did for a sample today turned out amazingly well and is at the Garden for show and tell for a little while longer.

… here it is!

It was a lot of fun. Flowers that don’t give much colour in a dye bath extracted for wool can still make fabulous prints on silk, and weeds that you have to cut down anyway make awesome dye baths for colouring your plain yarns. And it’s natural, no nasty chemicals involved, the waste products go in the compost heap … what’s not to love?

Canadian Ecoprinting: leaf print success

We have leaf prints!

Those are amur cherry leaves.

The really intriguing orangey yellow splotch is from a plant called Common Ninebark, which is one of the rose family (so I figured it might make a neat print – which it did). The parts of the plant I used had little flower blossoms on them, and they made fascinating colours!

Below that you can see a mountain ash (rowan) leaf.

So, technique: I put a bit of water in the sink and dropped in two used (very used) tea bags. I swished that around for a bit, took the tea bags out, and soaked the silk scarf for a few minutes. (Tannins help with mordanting, see.) The silk wasn’t pure white anymore, but it wasn’t very much stained by the tea as it had been very weak.

Then I laid out the damp silk and laid my plant leaves on the silk. I covered each section with watercolour paper, as I had read you could get imprints on the paper as well (which I did, see below). Then I layered plastic bags over the paper (some of which had writing on them, which was a mistake, as I have the words “Amur Cherry” imprinted in a sadly obvious spot on the scarf, I’ll have to cut that off), and folded the scarf into a rectangle. This was then steamed over a pot (cookie cooling rack over pot of boiling water, silk package laid on top of that and covered with an upended bowl) for a little bit, then put into a plastic bag sandwiched between two layers of bath towel and squashed under a heavy crock for three days.

I kept peeking, and when I could see that there were prints showing on the silk, I took it out. Amazing! The prints actually darken a little as the silk dries, and I’ll set them with the iron once it’s had a chance to dry completely.

The marks on the paper were also really interesting:

What I wanted most of all was for the layers of silk to be separated from one another, so that I could see the leaf shapes. This wouldn’t work really well if I rolled it into a sausage, because the layers would all smush into each other, so I thought folding it around a resist made the most sense – and why not use a resist that would make interesting prints on it’s own while I was at it?

I also used the frozen rose petals to make some dye: the dye bath came out brilliantly purple, but the resulting dye on the silk was that colour everyone calls “dusty rose” – a very pale almost tea-like shade with just a hint of pinkness to it. On the positive side, the dyebath and the silk smelled fabulous, a huge improvement over dock, which has a really weird mutant pickle smell to it once it gets wet and soggy.

I took the leftover rose petals from making the dyebath and pressed them between two small pieces of watercolour paper, steamed them briefly, and set them under the crock for a few days too. The paper smells just lovely and has some interesting swirly, watery prints on it. I’m curious to see what it looks like once it dries.

Encouraged by the leaf printing success, I took the rose dyed silk out of its dyebath and layered it with poplar, wild rose, and saskatoon leaves, since those are the plants I have in abundance around here. It’s been folded around plastic resists (no watercolour paper this time, and no ink on the bags) and is being squashed by the crock. I think the two step process should be very interesting – I actually don’t recall if I tea-dunked that one as well, but I think I did.

I also made a dyebath out of some frozen blue flowers, and we did get a lovely blue solution, but the yarn I stuck in it didn’t change colour – though the dyebath did exhaust. Or maybe the colour just faded out of the water, I don’t know. I didn’t have many flowers to start with so perhaps that’s part of the issue.

Anyway, we are making headway with the ecoprinting experiments … I can’t wait to do some more!

There is still room in the workshop at the Pegg Garden on August 25 … more info here!

Ecoprinting, Canadian style

I’ve been working on some test ecoprints, as there is a workshop coming up in August at the Pegg Garden and I need to have some examples to show – and I need to know which plants will give us good results, too!

I’m basing my experiments on the information in India Flint’s wonderful book Eco Colour. The book is fabulous, but the author is based in Australia and our plants are, of course, quite different from the ones she has available.

This means experimentation is required. Oh, how tragic. ;)

Experiments with leaves and plain, untreated cotton were disappointing. Cotton really does require pretreatment to take up colour from plants very well, I see. I’ve got some more pieces of cotton that are being soaked in some premordanting, and then we’ll see how they work out.

Silk, though … silk loves plant colours. Silk is easy to dye: just put the plants on the fabric, wrap it up in a tight sausage shape, dampen the whole thing and leave it in a plastic bag for a month or so.

I bundled up a bunch of plants in silk while I was in Ontario – pictures are here. I was going to leave it bundled until the workshop in August, but the colours were very clearly set and I was worried that the plants might start to rot in our warm weather so I unbundled it today. Also, there is some treatment required for it to look good, and I wanted to have something pretty to show people who might be considering attending the workshop, and so … unbundling happened today.

Here’s what it looked like before I unwrapped it:

You can see that the silk has turned many shades of brown, and that the string it’s wrapped up in has been dyed completely chocolate brown.

Unrolled, you can see that the leaves and other plant bits have indeed turned into slimy bits, for the most part. There were still pinecones and chunks of cedar, and some of the maple leaves were “peelable” but mostly, the plant stuff had just disintegrated.

I brushed off what I could, and spread the cloth out on the floor:

See that green? That’s a maple seed: it sprouted! I stuck it in some dirt, I dunno if it’ll grow, but it’s worth a try.

The next step is to let it dry and press it with a hot iron and a pressing cloth.

The colours are set by the heat, and the longer I can leave it now before washing, the better the colourfastness.

I unwrapped another small piece of silk that I had rolled up a few days ago, this one had ‘ditch weeds’ in it: clover, dandelions, alfalfa, vetch, and some yellow something or other that grows in the ditches here. I only left it for a few days, dampened and rolled tightly then put in a plastic bag on a window ledge, and the colours came out quite yellow and green, instead of brown:

There are a few spots where the plants didn’t make any marks, and a few where the purple flowers stained the fabric darker, but mostly it’s an interesting mix of greens and yellows.

Here are the two pieces after ironing:

I think that if I’d unwrapped the Ontario one earlier, I’d have had more greens and yellows – possibly even some purple from the flower heads, but of course I can’t be sure. More experimentation is in order! I did see a couple of small holes in the fabric, so perhaps a whole month was a bit too long, or perhaps something got in there and munched on the silk, I am not sure. I can work around it, of course, but it’s interesting to note.

I have another length of premordanted cotton (with alum and then milk) in the steamer today, it’s wrapped around dock (which is high in oxalic acid) and pineapple weed (which is just interesting), so we’ll see what happens with that – it was looking like there was green and brown coming through as it steamed, so I expect to get some good colour from that. I also have a length of silk wrapped around various leaves (poplar, willow, saskatoon, wild rose) and some weeds (goldenrod, and some small plant with leaves that look like the ones on maple trees), so we’ll see what that does. Both of those got a bit of time in the steamer, and then will sit on the window ledge for a few days until I see signs that they might be ready for pressing.

It’s an interesting adventure, to be sure – I will be at the Pegg Garden on Sunday so I will take some collection bags with me and hopefully pick up some flowers and other plant material so I can do a few more tests … there are some interesting techniques for dyeing with flowers that I want to try!

If you are interested in coming to the Pegg Garden workshop (August 25, 2013) you can register by contacting the Garden – information is on the right hand side of their web page, here. Hope to see you there!

Ontario, Day 7

Today was the final day of the Handspinning Seminar, which included Wheelwright’s keynote speech and demonstration of how to turn things on a lathe. My job was to operate the camera that provided a close up projected view of the spinning wheel parts or the work he was doing on the lathe, so I have no photos to show you as I was otherwise occupied! The demonstration was wonderfully informative, it was really cool to watch wood turn from a square piece of lumber into a curved and beautiful orifice hook handle.

Oh, even though I didn’t get a picture of him working today, I do have this picture of an orifice hook Wheelwright made for me – mine’s even got a captive ring on it. I saw a set of partially completed captive ring orifice hook handles in the toolbox on Saturday and exclaimed that they were lovely and I definitely wanted one like that … so Reed got out his tools and finished one off for me, right then and there.

See that little circle that goes around the neck of the thing? It’s carved from the same wood as the rest but it moves freely around the stem of the hook. I love captive rings, they are so cool.

My next stop was the GO Train station, and I had a relaxing journey from Burlington to Oshawa, where my friends live.

 

Trains are, in my humble opinion, the most civilized way to get from one place to another.

I’m here now, having been fed a lovely dinner, entertained by the Small People who live in this house, and topped up with cup after cup of tea. I’ll be heading to bed early tonight I think, as I am very sleepy … I keep yawning!

It’s been a fabulous trip and I am very glad I came. I knew it would take a lot out of me, which it has, but I’ve been pleased with how well my energy has held up for such a whirlwind of events and emotions. As much as it’ll be good to sleep in my own bed again, I sure miss living close to the people I love, and I don’t want to go so long without seeing everyone again.

In all the rush of the past week I’ve not had much chance to catch up with everyone individually, so I’ll just take this moment to send out my thanks to everyone who has made this trip possible and wonderful. You’ll be hearing from me soon, personally, I promise.

Ontario, Day 6

I should be sleeping, but the adrenaline rush is still on full blast so I might as well post today’s update while the valerian/hops blend kicks in!

The great news is that I slept 7 solid hours last night, which I desperately needed, so that was awesome as I was then able to face (and enjoy) the day.

First thing this morning I went down and got a cup of tea, and poked my head in the door where the conference session was on. The organizer person at the door said I should go in and participate if I wanted to, so I got to play! The theme of the conference is “spinning tales” and we were given an excerpt from a book and fibre to spin a yarn that somehow went with our story. I had the bit from the first Harry Potter book where Harry is at Hogwarts for the first time – the dining hall with the sparkling candles in midair, the silvery ghosts, and the ceiling that shows a sky spangled with stars. That was fun to spin!

As I was heading out of the seminar, I saw this wheel:

I stopped dead in my tracks, set down all my stuff and dug out my camera because I had to have a picture of it! I found the owner later on – her husband made the wheel for her, it’s really (REALLY) impressive. I hear he may be doing custom orders … I have contact info, email me if you want it. :)

Then it was time to get things going in the market. A lady brought a double flyer wheel for Wheelwright to have a look at:

(That swift in the foreground is an actual antique that was repaired – it’s got new bars, but the upright and screws are original. Yes, it’s for sale.)

There were a lot of gorgeous wheels.

A Paradis with the original pumpkin paint (in fabulous shape, boy does this thing spin beautifully):

A reproduction CPW done in pine; a very old, very wonderful (really, really wonderful) screw tension wheel that was at some point painted (or partially painted) blue; a Bisson that isn’t quite fully refinished yet…

A lovely little flax wheel, a marked Philias Cadorette, and you can just see the leg of a really cute little child’s wheel (which is part of Wheelwright’s personal collection). All but the baby wheel are looking for homes, and I spun on every one of them and loved them all! It’s a good thing I came here on a plane. That pumpkin wheel or that once-blue-screw tension would probably find their way into my car if it were here.

So my purpose here was to spin on the wheels and help folks who wanted to try them out. Basically, I got to sit around and play with gorgeous wheels and talk to people … it was awesome!

My aunt and uncle came down from Brampton and we got to visit for part of the morning and then have tea during our midafternoon break. I never did get a picture, we were too busy chatting and having a good time, but boy oh boy was it wonderful to see them. It’s been way too long.

We convinced other spinners to test the wheels (see, Aunt Sharon? she spins barefoot too!)…

And I spun and plyed up 100 grams of lovely black fibre. When I had the bobbin all filled up, Wheelwright suggested we skein it up on the antique swift. Now, I’d been sitting there spinning and chatting to this lovely gentleman who told me, after some time, that his career was making spinning wheels.

I was sitting next to Gord Lendrum. Yes, *that* Gord Lendrum.

So, my yarn was skeined by the man behind a Canadian wheel manufacturing company and a wheel repair expert, while I stood there and watched.

They even wound it into a ball when it was time to pack up for the day.

Do I have an awesome life or what, eh?

In the evening there was a dinner and a fashion show (inspiring, as always) and then a spin-in … during which I spun up another bobbin full of yarn and plyed it, this time on a marked Dejsardins. Yep, it’s been a fun day.

Tomorrow morning Wheelwright is doing his keynote speech, all about assessing and repairing/restoring antique wheels. I’ll be operating the camera that will be used to project the detailed view of what he’s discussing (a part of the wheel, for instance) onto the screen so that everyone in the room can see even if they are at the back.

I suppose that means I should get some sleep, since I need to be downstairs in about seven hours. Uh, make that six.

Tomorrow is another busy day – conference in the morning, train in the afternoon, visiting with some of my Chosen Family in the evening … then sleep fast and get on the plane to go home the day after! What a whirlwind this trip has been … but it’s been a wonderful time.

Seeing my family was just like coming home, didn’t seem like anything really out of the ordinary, we were just … all together. Like it ought to be. It isn’t like that very often though, and I’m really, really glad I came … because I have so enjoyed being with everyone ‘for real’. Add to that the chance to meet Wheelwright after four years of online friendship, to play with lovely wheels and meet wonderful people and make pretty string (all at once!), see my aunt and uncle, and see one of my very best friends and his family … and well, things just don’t get much better than that.

I’m very blessed, and very grateful.

Ontario Days 4 & 5

I’m (finally) feeling tired so this’ll be brief.

We went to St Jacobs, where we met up with my sister and her husband, and checked out the market and the antique stores and the Home Hardware museum and a fabulous quilt/fibre arts shop and lots of other neat things.

The information centre in Leamington is shaped like a tomato. This, of course, is because the Heinz factory is in town. Leamington is all about tomatoes!

The tablecloth at this produce booth was hand woven:

 

Neat stuff at the hardware museum:

That was Thursday. We spent the night in a little B&B out in the country … which is different than the Alberta definition of ‘out in the country’ in that the roads are paved and you can do 90 km/h (if it is in an area with few Amish, who still use horses & buggies to get around). I woke up early and went outside to try and walk some sense into my body and saw this:

We all went to St Mary’s where there is a lovely river and some spots where there used to be large waterwheels, to power grinders or what have you.

Look, it’s my family at the Thames River:

Then everyone headed off in different directions – me to the fibre conference with my friend Wheelwright, my parents to visit an old friend who lives in a seniors home (Dad plays the piano for her and it makes her very happy), and my sister and her husband to head home.

Here’s Wheelwright spinning on one of his restored antiques – this one is from about 1860 he figures, and it’s amazing. Awesome to spin on.

And I am, finally, tired enough to sleep … so I shall go do that and I’ll tell you more about the conference and the wheels tomorrow.

If I tried to put all this in my daytimer…

… I’d need an extra page.

So here's what I've done so far:

I got the motorhome cleaned, scrubbed, and smudged with incense. Put bedding on the beds. Loaded some canned goods into the cupboard. Stove, water, and water heater tested. (Need to test the furnace tomorrow!) Tried to start it, no go, probably needs a boost – The Reluctant Farmer is taking care of that. Took out some of the shop stock so that at least that much will be ready when I get home from Ontario. (More on that in a bit.)

I've also been doing a bunch of laundry in our new washing machine - the old one died a long-anticipated death on Thursday morning, and we were able to pick up a new one (well, new to us – the people had listed it on Kijiji just that day, and their place was not far off my route home from counselling, so it worked out perfectly). The new machine is WONDERFUL – it’s really big, and very quiet, and doesn’t dance across the floor or complain about being unable to drain. When I arrived to pick it up, the people were there talking with a friend who’d obviously come by on his way home from work. I recognized the company name on his truck, as it’s the same place my friend with the horses works. I asked if they might know one another and sure enough, they do. “Oh yeah,” the guy said, “he was talking to me about this McGavin’s Bread wagon he’s gonna restore …” I laughed. “He was at my house yesterday with one of the spokes for that wagon, I’m taking it with me when I go to Ontario so my wheelwright friend can make copies!" Apparently that detail had been mentioned in the conversation … it was quite a coincidence! I felt all, I dunno, famous or something.

So, laundry – which dries nice and quick outside in this sunny and somewhat breezy weather, and motorhome prep, and also getting ready for the show tomorrow. It’s Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, and I’ll be there selling my woven items, one hand knit scarf (in really wild muppet yarn), and my books … and weaving, and spinning, and generally just being a fibre artist where everyone can watch. I also have some fabric with me so I can do the tests of ecoprinting with the plants that grow in the garden in advance of our workshop coming later this summer (the workshop is the last weekend in August, also at the Garden). I’ll need to be there a bit early so I can wander off and get plant samples rolled up into fibery cocoons for steaming and colour setting. They have to sit for a few weeks, so I need to get them wrapped and steamed before I leave so they can sit and do their marinating thing while I’m off gallivanting around.

I did get the wheel, spindles, and all my stuff out into the van tonight – and I took my gray coat, to show as a sample of what can be done for custom work (it’s also a different shape, so I want to have both the swing coat and the blanket coat there to display) … and I grabbed some yarn so I can warp up the little loom once I’m there. I’d sort of thought I might do that ahead of time, but really, I’m out of energy and I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow as the show goes from 11-4, and warping is just another part of the whole adventure so people might as well see that too.

Oh, and yesterday I did most of my packing for my trip to Ontario – I am gone all day tomorrow, and I have to be at the airport for 6:30 Monday morning (which I clearly did not process when I chose that flight time … an 8:30 am departure seems quite reasonable, until you factor in the need to be at the airport two hours early and the fact that it takes over an hour and a half to get to the airport from home). We will be adding in time to stop for coffee on the way, trust me. I’m heading to see my parents, and then my sister and brother in law will join up with us for a day, and Friday I’ll be heading to Burlington for the Ontario Handspinning Seminar where I will be helping out my friend Wheelwright with his antique spinning wheel sales and assisting during the keynote speech he’s giving. Oh, and doing the last minute assembly of the giveaway items that he was asked to make for the Saturday night banquet! (I know what they are, but I think they are a surprise so I won’t say.) It sounds like it’s gonna be a blast.

Then once the conference is over on Sunday afternoon, I’ll hop on the train and go to Oshawa to visit some of my Chosen Family, and Monday afternoon I fly back home.

Then I do a bunch of laundry, go for groceries, load up the motorhome and head to Olds for Fibre Week!

I am gonna need all of July to recover from this, but it’s gonna be an awesome ride.

Stay tuned for more of the adventure!

There are no Fibre Police

This past weekend was the local fibre guild’s annual retreat, and I was invited to be the instructor for the weekend!

I ran a workshop titled “There are no Fibre Police”, an exploration into the fun side of fibre arts. We did variegated dyeing, art yarn, and nuno felting over the course of two days and we had a lot of fun experimenting and seeing what happened when we tried different things.

We dyed skeins of yarn with Wilton’s icing dye – we got bright colours and funky patterns using entirely food-safe materials. Given what this stuff does to yarn, I’m not really sure about eating it … but hey, it is awfully pretty!

We spent Saturday afternoon playing with an assortment of fibres and ‘additives’, making interesting yarns:

We had bits of yarn shrapnel, feathers, fuzzy store-bought yarn, firestar, and a whole pile of assorted things on the table and people tried blending the various bits and pieces together to see what happened.

We made thick-and-thin singles, plyed them with crochet cotton or funky yarns. Some knitted their creations into headbands, and others talked of plans to make stuffed toys for their kids, or perhaps interesting cuffs on funky mittens or hats.

On Sunday, we took fabric scarves and felted bits of fibre and assorted other bits and bobs onto them. Fortunately we were able to work outside in the sun, since this is kind of a messy job!

(Yes, that is a baby sheep by her feet … a bottle lamb that needed to be fed and taken care of was one of our weekend participants!)

All in all it was a fun and adventurous weekend – several of the participants came by to tell me that they’d really enjoyed themselves, which is exactly what I’d hoped for!

If your guild, conference, or fibre group would be interested in having me facilitate a workshop like this, please feel free to contact me (frazzlehead at flannelberrycreek dot com) … I love to share the joy of fibre arts!