Coffee With My Walnuts Please

No, I am not having dessert, just a bit of kitchen dying.

Coffee and Walnuts Shibori lining

Kitchen dying has been one of my activities this past year. Wanting to line a knitted scarf with silk, I decided to have my fun in the kitchen rather than downstairs in the dye lab.

The silk was from the bolt, so I gave it a good machine wash and dry to shrink it and get any sizing out. I had a few hard lessons in this department earlier this year. 

 I then wetted the silk out, brewed a good pot of coffee, mixed it and some vinegar in a pan and simmered the silk on low for about an hour.

We had some very old black walnuts in a shed. I removed the husks ( I used the walnuts whole), simmered them in water for one hour, cooled the mixture, and strained the liquor.  

Meanwhile, I simmered the now beautiful coffee tanned silk in a solution of alum and cream of tartar for a mordant,* then let it then simmer in the walnut solution for an hour and let it cool. Finally, I took the band wrapped marbles out to see the pattern.

During this process, I was pretty careful to make sure the dye baths never boiled. I try to baby the silk. 

I am very happy with the results. This is a perfect subtle pattern for my scarf lining. 

Section of the scarf that I lined.   The lining  covers up the embroidery in the back.  The sheep are some of my handspun from my Shetland flock

I now have a liter of Black Walnut juice in my freezer in case I have to do this again! 

*a substance used before the application of a dye, possessing the ability to fix the dye in textiles. Mordants can also effect the tone that the dye takes on.  There are other types of mordants, alum is just a very safe one.

Dying With The Purpura Pansa-A True Lost Art

Purple-stained fingers and nails are signs of a Purpura hunter and dyer

On the Oaxaca coast of Mexico, a small band of sixteen men carry on an ancient tradition.  They coax a thimbleful of ink (really a narcotic to paralyze prey) from the mollusk Purpura Pansa.  For centuries, this beautiful purple yarn has been woven into posahuancos, a traditional sarong like skirt.

The red line marks the traditional habitat of the Purpura Pansa. The red star is the approximate location of Pinotepa de Don Luis, Oaxca, home of the dye hunters. Note that the men live far inland and must make a five hour journey to the coast.

The dye season lasts October through March. Only large mollusks are milked. After milking, the shell is returned to a protected crevice unharmed so the mollusk will regenerate its ink.

A photo of the little guy, mollusk Purpura Pansa.

 

It takes about 300-400 Purpuras to dye one 12 oz. skein of yarn and the dyers can only work for about three hours a day.  The white ink is dabbed onto a skein of cotton thread that the dyers carry wrapped around their forearms.  Purpura then becomes a yellow green, but with oxygen, it turns purple.  Fixatives are not needed. A true Purpura yarn will carry a briny-ocean smell, a way of checking the yarn's authenticity.

With only sixteen men gathering a dwindling mollusk population, this is an art truly endangered of being lost.

Fives hours from home, a dyer on the hunt.

 

There is a lovely website devoted to this tradition, which you might find interesting here.

I first learned about this tradition from the Spring 2012 emag “Colorways”, which can be downloaded (for a reasonable fee) for PC, MAC, or IPad.

Traditional cloth woven with the Purpura Pansa dyed cotton. The skirts have bands of purpura, indigo and red (dyed with cochineal) on hand-spun silk. These lengths are woven on back-strap looms. 

Yoga Totes Redux

Indigo Shibori Yoga Totes

Note on photo: The photo shows the front and back of the bags. One side has the double pockets and the other has the large circle motif.

During the last day of a Natural Dye class (last summer) at the Kansas City Art Institute, our instructor gave us a wonderfully generous mass of cotton. I had to turn this into something. The something that emerged was Yoga Totes for my yoga-practicing daughters.

Yoga Totes is a project combining three disciplines: dying, knitting (using a Bond knitting machine), and sewing. The main components are white cotton (from Dharma), white Shetland yarn (from me—well, from my sheep first), blue cotton lining (Hancock Fabric), and various machine embroidery threads (from anywhere). The bags are deeper than  regular totes.  This leaves room for blocks, extra clothes, and in a pinch a mat can be thrown in (it does stick out,  however).


Pre-reduced Indigo was used for both home and class pots. Dips were from anywhere from 15 seconds to three minutes were used. The wool yarn had the shortest dips. Caution was used because I didn’t want the alkaline environment of the Indigo to hurt my acid loving wool.

Our Fancy Indigo set up-a 5 gallon bucket-notice how  green the Indigo is. It will turn blue when it hits the air. 

Before the fabric was dipped, I created different patterns using Shibori*. I clamped, twisted, tied and banded. My favorite motif is the flower-type shape on the band and main body of the bag. These flower shapes were created with our old castrater gun for the sheep, the green castrating bands, and marbles. That tool has definitely been re-purposed!

Closer view of the fulled machine knitting with the machine embroidery

The knitted wool pockets were fulled in the washing machine. Not wanting to hand knit something that was going to be fulled, I finally learned to use my Bond knitting machine. I was very lucky that two Bond knitting gurus were at our last KC Fiber Guild retreat and got me jump-started. I would like to give a big thank you to Leslie and Shirley for their patience and expertise.

Finally, I put some of my machine’s decorative stitches through their paces and created my first embroidery with my embroidery component. The radiating sun fit in the yoga theme that I wanted and that motif was built into my machine.

Another nice little touch if your machine will let you-put the name of the recipient inside the bag-nothing like the personal touch!

This project combined three things that were fairly new to me: natural dying, machine knitting, and machine embroidery. Sewing is an old friend, going back to my very early youth. Shibori is not new but I had not really created much using it. Taking a Shibori course at KCAI simultaneous with the natural dye class certainly helped combine both disciplines.

*Shibori is the Japanese art of tie dying.