Another Weaving Going to the Right Coast

A couple of days ago, Alanna at the American Craft Council emailed asking me to participate in a new PR campaign that ACC is planning for the 2012 shows. She sent an image from a previous ACC show application that she thought would work well in the photo shoot. Unfortunately, of course, I no longer have that particular scarf in inventory - it sold over a year ago. But I had another in the same sort of style and colorway (the Feather Series), so off it went to the PR company in Baltimore.



Keep your eyes peeled for ACC ads next spring that pair a collector with a piece by an ACC exhibitor.

BTW, the scarf has an interleaved threading with 3 parallel design lines (advancing offset points), each threaded in a different color (blue, green, violet) and a networked treadling in a 4th color. There are 2 articles on my website that describe my experimentation with interleaved threadings.

In a comment on the post about the cocobolo dyepot, Rebecca said she was unfamiliar with that dye, and would I post pictures of the skein when it's finished. Of course, I will! It'll be a gorgeous russet brown, and worthy of a photo.

Before today's synthetic dyes, all dyers had to put color on fiber were natural dyes; the best and most colorfast of those were based on wood or tree byproducts. Walnut, osage, fustic, cutch: all are well-known dyes that come from wood. One might also include madder, alkanet, and all the others that come from woody roots in that same category. Any woody material that has a deep rich color will make color on fiber. And because they all contain some tannin, they're self-mordanting to some extent, although I always use an alum premordant too because the amount of tannin varies quite a lot in different wood dyes and I want to be sure the colors are fast. Also keep in mind that cellulose fibers like a tannin mordant, so these dyes work well on yarn like tencel.

Since DH is a woodturner, I have an abundant supply of sawdust and wood chips to experiment with. All you have to do to have a free supply of dye materials is make friends with a woodworker.

In the case of the cocobolo dye, the chips came from one of DH's fellow woodturners. All it cost me was a big skein of knitting wool that I'm dyeing so he can give it to his daughter as a gift. $10 for yarn is a small price to pay for a huge supply of dye material :-)

The colors are easy (but slow) to extract. As I have mentioned before, you can download a PDF that describes the procedure I use from this page on my website.