Let me begin by saying, I do not have a kitchen that's well set up for dyeing yarn or wool. (Anyone who knows me can also confirm that I do not have a kitchen well set up for cooking, either. But since I do not know how to cook, that's not a problem. I can go for years without touching a stove.) It's tricky to do dyeing here (Ya think? Look at the mess above). I have a lot of dyeing to do for the Moon and Clouds rug I'll be starting soon. I've been thinking about this rug for a while. Moon and Clouds is a runner-type rug, a McAdoo rug pattern that I haven't yet seen anyone else make. It's one of the only remaining patterns I have--after I finish it, I'll be working with my own rug designs from here on out. [I will make one exception for the final pattern I own, a fabulous one called "Russian Oriental"; it's gorgeous and intimidating, but I am slowly inching towards being ready to hook it. Maybe I'll get that done in the next couple of years.] Moon & Clouds is 3 feet by 6 feet and will use about 14 pounds of yarn. I have nowhere in my house to put this rug. Several people have suggested I will need to buy a house in order to use the rug. Hmmmm. On Friday I started testing background colors; I have an mental image of what I want for the background but am still playing with what I'll use for the motifs. I decided to try a purple recipe I learned from Heidi Whipple of the Oxford Rug School. I wasn't sure I could replicate her color, but look at this for a result! Not bad! The yarn I am trying to match can be seen in the two strands that are laid across the skeins. And next to that photo is the same yarn made into "yarn cakes" after it was completely dry. Yes, those are the same skeins in each picture, just differently wound, and the photos were taken in different lights. But both photos are of the same yarn. Wish I were a better photographer and knew how to eliminate the lighting differences. Encouraged by all that, I went to town on Saturday and produced the test skeins on the right (the "yarn cakes" in the photos are the same yarn cakes that you see above). What a day. I spent five hours dyeing, with a couple of breaks, and by the end was really happy with my results. I'm still not entirely certain if I will end up using any of these colors--or some combination of all of the dark purples as the background color of the rug--but I am so happy to be playing with color and dyes after all this time. If you want to see a closer view of some of the colors and brief captions for each, click any of the photos below. It has been years since I tried to do any serious dyeing of wool or yarn. When I was working full-time it was impossible. Perhaps if I'd had the room for a permanent dye kitchen (or a differently configured regular kitchen) I would have made the time, but since any type of serious dyeing requires completely deconstructing and protecting a small space normally used for preparing food, that wasn't realistic. Now that I have more time, I can afford to do all the set-up and take-down that dyeing requires in the space that I have.
I have more color test skeins to make, and then once I've decided on the colors I will have a lot more dyeing to do. 14 lbs of 4 oz. skeins = 56 skeins to dye for this rug. Plus a few extras to be safe. I will be busy. Truth to tell, this was a week for which I barely have anything to show. I did get to the studio a couple of times and I did do some tangling, but other commitments (and a long binge on YouTube with a PBS-based mystery series) meant I neglected things. I did some tarot work for ten people on Friday evening which kept me quite busy as well, between the preparation, the drive to the venue, the work with each client, and the trip home. But mostly I feel like I just fiddled around this week...frustrating. Here are two things I did accomplish: #1: A 10.5" tile. This is at the preliminary, pre-coloring, pre-shading stage. It's been sitting for days while I decide what to do next. #2: I made it to the studio for a chunk of time and finished one of the short borders. One more to go, and then the final outer border. Here's the progress on that: I am listening to Jane Austen's Emma on my iPhone while hooking. It's just delightful. Compare the above photo to where I was on October 24th: Yup, it's definitely progressing. I'm pleased.
One very fun thing I did this week was to spend a fair amount of time over two days with my friend K, "helping her" dye some yarn for her next rug project. That's in quotes because I suspect I actually got in her way much more than I helped. I will start dyeing my own yarn for my own (very big) rug project within the next couple of weeks, and expect that will keep me busy for a very long time. I hope I can get more done in the week to come. I have a long trip scheduled on one day, so we shall see... Yesterday I spent part of the day dyeing yarn. The skein on the left in the photo above is the yarn I was aiming to match. The skein on the right is what I got. Not even close! But a lovely failure all the same; I'll certainly use it in the future in some project. So what happened? I knew before I did this that my chances were poor for producing a match by using the same recipe. Why? Read on.
I knew when I tried this that my chances of success were low. I don't strictly have to match the original yarn, because I still have enough of it to finish the rug; I just wanted the challenge. What I learned: 1) I really love the yarn that I ended up with. Love the color. So it's an elegant failure in my book, and one I am happy to have. 2) I need to do a lot more experimenting, and that's going to be fun, fun, fun. Now, if only I can apply this in the rest of my life. Take more risks, learn more from and enjoy my elegant failures. And learn just as much from the inelegant ones! How to write about something that cannot be disclosed for months? That's the dilemma. The rug I am about to begin can't be photographed or discussed until after it appears in a show scheduled to open in the autumn of 2015 in Vermont. I cannot even say what it's about, since it's going to be on a particular theme, and the show's creators have asked us not to disclose the theme. I get it. But still, how to even address the fact that I am indeed hooking? Or punching...since I plan to do both on this temporarily "secret" rug. I've been prepping for this project for months, literally, since I agreed to do it last August. I immediately regretted saying yes after I was invited to participate, since the proportions are larger than I normally work, and since it has a deadline for completion (6/30/15) and I am notoriously slow. I really was kicking myself for agreeing to do the rug. But lately I've begun to see the benefits. Despite all my kvetching, doing this work will stretch me in ways I haven't had to stretch before, and that's wonderful for any artist. Realization about this began to dawn when I understood that I would need a different type of frame to punch and hook on. My small hooking frames, wouldn't work, and my mid-size punch hooking frame was also too small and not on a stand. As the rug grows heavier, I'll need the frame to be on a stand. Sooooo...I hauled out my old DeGraff frame, that had tacking strips on it, and decided to convert it to gripper strips. Here it is, completed ----> OMG, what a process to tackle solo. Off came the old tacking strips; that part was easy! But can I just say that glueing and stapling the gripper strips to the sides, while making sure they curve over the sides, is not a job for one person? I desperately needed someone to hold the strips down against the wet glue while I stapled madly. Stubbornness rose to the fore, and despite shredding my hands, I got it done. Alone. Of course it required a bit of staple-removal and re-stapling the following day, but as I said, I got it done. So proud of myself. And yes, underneath the stand in the photo, on the floor, is one of my old rugs. Then there was the designing. Around and around I went. The less said about that process the better...I can say, however, that meditation was a big help with the process. Every time I sat down to meditate, some other idea for the design would come to mind. Finally I had something to settle on...but that's how it felt...like I was "settling." But then, a couple of days later in another meditation, inspiration hit and I got an idea for how to turn the design into something really wonderful, based on the show's theme. And just like that, I was off and running. I love meditation. But now...what to work with--wool fabric or yarn? I have a lot of both, but I need very specific colors for this project and none of the yarn was dyed. Then I remembered my upcoming workshop in Vermont. Ah, and here's where the process becomes even more inspired. Let me start with Vermont and a little of that famous Vermont Magic. What is it about Vermont??? Several months back, I had signed up for a yarn dyeing workshop at Amy Oxford's wonderful Oxford Rug School. Check out their brochure and photos--there's even a little video tour about the site, which is just gorgeous and so incredibly comfortable. And then, of course, there is Amy herself, one of the world's kindest and most patient people, and her talented school manager, Heidi Whipple, who was the teacher for the dyeing workshop. Honestly, at the time I signed up I didn't even know I'd be working on this rug. I just wanted to go back there because the place is so beautiful and I enjoyed being there the one time I had gone. But now, suddenly, I had the need to dye yarn. In the 1970's I had dyed a lot of yarn using natural dyes, and way back then the process was positively onerous. Since then, I've dyed wool fabric with ProChem Acid Dyes (so much easier), but not yarn. And dyeing yarn's a different process--or rather, the handling of the yarn is very different than handling fabric.. So off I went, a 4.5 hour drive one way because of the need to get over the mountains. Arrived on Friday and had a chance to use Amy's giant light box to finally get my entire pattern traced on the backing. Which I cannot show, darn it! The light box there made that task easy to accomplish; at home, I simply couldn't have done it without so much more effort. Since I cannot show the design, here are some pix of the inside of the school ...you get the idea. Basically, it's just gorgeous. And inspirational to the max. I had no idea how much fun I was about to have! The well-equipped dye kitchen is upstairs, as are the simple and lovely guestrooms. I was the only guest staying over that weekend, and it was bliss to be alone there at night. Saturday night I stayed up late dyeing yarn--but I am getting ahead of myself. Heidi was just a terrific teacher, and taught us how to dye variegated colors. Now, I know how to dye mottled yardage, but with yarn it's a whole other process, and the process she taught us was particularly effective. And the results! But again, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Class started on Saturday morning, and since I arrived there on Friday, I had the place to myself that night and spent a few hours in the store and classroom next to the store, laying out my newly-transferred pattern and trying various yarns for background and the motifs. There is a lot of background in this rug. I had planned to use wool yardage for that, but suddenly I found a wonderful variegated yarn called Deep Blue Sea, and I knew immediately that I wanted to dye all the background for the rug that weekend. So that's what I did. Ta-da...: That's actually overexposed--it's a darker shade. But in front of the wound balls, you can see one skein; that skein is the original skein being sold in the store that I was trying to copy. I succeeded. What a great feeling! Each skein was individually dyed; there's no way to dye a quantity simultaneously. Gives me a new appreciation for the cost of hand-dyed yarn, for sure. There was only ONE drawback------> A big one! No one else's hands looked like this, but apparently I couldn't keep mine out of the dye and both hands had dark blue fingers and palms. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't wash off. It was also under my fingernails, and I had to attend a professional meeting on the Monday after the workshop. Uh-oh. I remembered that I had once used a hand cleaner that worked well, which I'd gotten from ProChem, but the school didn't have any on hand; they'd only just become aware of its existence. I'd last used mine in the late 80's or early 90's, and I didn't know if it might be still sitting in my long-unopened dye cabinet or not. And after all that time, even if I did have it, would it work? Well, to see the results, scroll down to the end of the post. Everyone else was trying out various colors during the weekend--here are some of their results. I so wanted to experiment with other colors, but I knew that in order to leave with all my background in hand, I needed to stick with dyeing one color. So hard to do when all these other luscious colors were being produced: There's no way to do justice to the beautiful colors others were making all weekend. We dyed from 9 a.m. on Saturday (Heidi got us started right off--we were all in the process by 9.45 or sooner) until people left for dinner. I kept right on going until about 8 pm when I realized I was starting to make mistakes. Here are the last skeins I dyed late on Saturday, and although I followed the process, they became "outliers." I love them but likely cannot use them in the rug. (The "outliers" are in the front bottom of the photo. Same dyes, same process, different results. Go figure, especially since all the other skeins came out exactly right.) Such an interesting process. I was lucky enough to be with three other talented women in the class; I enjoyed all of them. One of them has made 22 rugs already this year and is just doing the most incredible, whimsical, original rugs. The other two ladies are in Amy's Wednesday night weekly class and are also both experienced at punching. When I went to Vermont, I hadn't intended to punch quite so much of the rug, but by the time I was on my way home--delirious with success and staggeringly tired--I had decided to punch most of it. I'm just totally thrilled with my experience there and cannot wait to go back when I don't have background to dye and can spend a weekend dyeing lots of different colors. Heidi was a wonderful teacher and I feel confident that I can dye anything now. Arrived home with my heavily stained hands; went to my dye cabinet, which I haven't opened in 20 years. (Thank goodness dyes don't come with expiration dates.) Sure enough, there was my ancient ProChem hand cleaner, and when I opened it it appeared to be just as usable as the day I last closed the cap. So, I gave it a try: HURRAH! One application and 98% better. The photo is after one application. One more, and the dark blue was entirely gone. Thank goodness. The stuff worked like a charm. I've been home for a week now, and I'm just as jazzed up by the experience as I was when I was there. But...I haven't begun the rug yet, and I have everything I need now. The intimidation factor has set in temporarily. I have promised myself to begin it today or tomorrow, but first, there's one more post to write. Make something. It's so satisfying. |
ABOUT ME I'm a textile artist (traditional rug hooking, punch needle rug hooking, and other textile arts), a long-time meditator, a certified meditation teacher and coach, and focused on learning about the interplay of art, creativity, and mindfulness every day. Categories
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