The members of the Fiber Artisans Guild are passionate about their commitment to the fiber community–both locally and internationally. We support groups that help artists and fiber workers and are a member of the Conference of Northern California Handweavers.
Working Alone Together
With the new normal imposed by Covid-19 our monthly meetings have been suspended indefinitely. However this does not mean we have been idle. We still communicate with each other. Here are photos of projects from Natalie, Sandy, Sharolene, and Frank.
Here is Natalie’s no-pattern knit cardigan and the beginning of her basket being made from fabric and yarn.
Sandy, our tapestry aficionado, finished her stunning tapestry of a burro. Those of us who have been learning tapestry techniques from Sandy are left speechless.
Sharolene has added three tops and a hat to her wardrobe and has some new yarn to experiment with.
Frank has stunned us by learning to do Irish needle lace and making this memorial piece for his neighbor’s cat out of hand-spindle spun cat fur. It measures 4.5 x 4.5 inches.
Who knows what the rest of us may be working on! We are eager to get together again to share our love of fiber.
By early October our prolific tapestry weaver, Sandy, finished her tapestry called My Father’s Ghost and is already hatching ideas for her next tapestry.
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Frank has caught the tapestry bug fish too. Here is his Fish in a Tin.
Tapestries! Time for a New Beginning
We have finished our tapestries and learned much. It is time for a new start. We will design our own with more complex shapes and shading and continue our this adventure.
Our Tapestry Samplers
We are continuing the tapestry project we started last January. Every month we learn a little more. This month some of us finished our samples and are looking forward to designing our own tapestries now that we know some of the tricks to making shapes, dyeing our yarn with natural dyes, and starting and finishing our piece. Here is a glimpse of this ongoing project.
Natural Dyes: Our Results
Today we surveyed the results of our recent project and divided our skeins among our members. In recent months we have experimented with indigo, weld, osage orange, cochineal, and walnuts. Here is what we have.
- Weld mordanted with soda ash to adjust the pH and boiled (top, left)
- Osage orange – we found that pH matters (bottom, left)
- Osage orange overdyed with indigo (top, second from left)
- Weld overdyed with indigo (top, third from left)
- Indigo overdyed with walnuts (top, fourth from left)
- Indigo dipped three or four times for two minutes (top, fifth from left)
- Indigo dipped once for two minutes (right end)
- Light indigo overdyed in cochineal afterbath (bottom, right)
- Cochineal mordanted with cream of tartar to adjust the Ph dipped for ten minutes (bottom, second from right)
- Cochineal mordanted with cream of tartar to adjust the Ph dipped for one hour (on reel)
- Cochineal overdyed with black walnuts (lower row, center)
- Indigo overdyed with cochineal (bottom, second from left)
We also put together a goodie basket to be sold at the raffle for the Conference of Northern Califiornia Handweavers (CNCH) conference in 2020. Here is what we have so far.
A lovely day with much accomplished!
Dyeing for Red
For centuries red has been revered–and hard to come by–as a color to dye for. Its scarcity, along with purple, has often made it a color reserved for royalty. But over the centuries some recipes have been developed to achieve a vibrant red. This month we are dyeing some of our wool with cochineal, a red dye developed in South and Central America. This dye was developed from beetles(!) that live on cactus plants. It has been used as the Navajo red made famous in some of the early rugs from the Navajo nation.
The process is not simple. We mordanted our wool. (That means pre-treating it with an oxide solution to help fix the dye so it won’t fade). We had purchased a few ounces of the dried cochineal beetles which we ground in a coffee grinder that we use exclusively for our dyeing. We mixed these powdered beetles with water and simmered the mixture for an hour. We then took our warmed damp mordanted wool skeins and simmered them in the dye bath.
Some of the skeins we had already dyed yellow of blue, so we were overdyeing them to see what colors we might get.
Here is the result of our adventure.
As usual we had a few surprises but were very impressed with our results.
We now have the following tapestry wool for each of the members. The first photo, from left to right, shows wool dyed in weld (top), dyed in osage orange (bottom). The next two skeins are indigo dyed dipped three or four times (top) and dipped one time (bottom). The third set of skeins are the weld and osage orange skeins over-dyed with one dip in indigo and the last two skeins were over-dyed three or four times in indigo.
The second photo is weld over-dyed with cochineal and osage orange over-dyed with cochineal.
The third photo is indigo dipped four times and over-dyed with cochineal.
In 2012 I visited two Zapotec weavers, Jaime and Joey, who lived in the Central Valley. Jaime’s family, originally from Mexico, had been weavers for four generations. Hanging on the front porch were a number of cactus pads, which Jaime’s father had gathered from the desert in Southern California. The cactus was home to cochineal beetles who protect themselves from the desert heat by surrounding themselves with a white “insulation” which they produce somehow.
Jaime crushed one of these “cocoons” to show me the red produced by the beetles, which are dried before being used. (They literally die for dye!)
We also were intrigued to see Sharolene’s new tiny spinning “wheel”. This little portable device is an electric spinner that can run off a battery, is speedy and versatile, and makes almost no noise. See more about it here.
Fiber Artisans of San Jose 