Gathered Collors

After completing my warp painting, I became interested in gathering dye plants to create a piece that would document my passage through a place. For this project, I decided to weave of short strips (5' by 6.5') of cloth with the warp mordented while the weft is not. After gathering dye plants, I will use each plant to dye a different woven cloth. This exploration will  help explore different dye plants that grow around Nova Scotia as well as create a visual road map of my journey.

 This is Marigold that was grown on my balcony garden

Painting warp with natural dyes

 

This summer, I decided to focus on working with natural dyes. For my first project, I've set up a linen warp (strings stretched lengthwise on the loom), which I use as a canvas for painting on with thickened natural dye extracts. Each day, I weave off and paint on a new section inspired by watercolour nature studies that I do during my walks around Nova Scotia.

Process:
After scouring the linen in soda ash (2% ) and cotton scour (5.5%), I've mordanted it with alum acetate (8%) and left it overnight in the bath. After drying the scans in the dryer on high setting I've dipped them into water mixed with a handful of wheat bran to secure the mordant on the yarn. Four days later when the scans were finally dry, I winded them into bolls. Then, I immediately realized that my scans were too large and had to few loops so they got really tangled. The warp that I winded was 4.5m long, 30/3 linen, 16 inch wide and 32 e.p.i.

For the paint, I used natural dye extracts bought from MAIWA, which I mixed with a little gum tragacan thickener, for which I followed the instructions on their website. I also used indigo for painting. For this recipe, I mixed 10g indigo (agitated first with a little water and marbles), 20g Ferris sulfate and 30g calx. I found that this recipe works best if I let it sit for a week before using it.

As I started painting and weaving off the warp, I found that my tension was a little funky because I tried painting on my warp with iron acetate, which weakened my threads causing a whole bunch of them to break. Other then that incident, the weaving goes really smoothly, and I don't have any problems with breakage. I am weaving with indigo dyed silk in the weft, as well using various yarn as inlay.

working on the warp painting:

This is the collection of water colour nature studies I've done.

No Waste Garment

Sometimes, waste can take up a lot of your fabric. This can be especially daunting if the fabric is really expensive or take long time to make (usually trough for weavers). Here is a very interesting technique of making garments without having any waste. That's how lots of traditional garments are made. Take a sheet of paper and cut it into various squares and triangles, re-assemble in desired fashion and translate this design into fabric. Remember that the material you take away in one area can be added on into another, just don't make your process too small. For beginners its better to stick to large geomertical shapes avoiding curves, tightly fitted designs and small peaces. One last advice, add on extara fabric or leave extra room in the armpits, sleeves, waste and crouch area. Remember you can always gather extra fabric with elastics,belt or string.
Below  is my no waste garment I made in muslin...

Burnout or Devore' project

Today I made Devore' or otherwise known as burnout. This seemingly harmless paste burns away the cellulose fibres (cotton, rayon, linen) leaving all other fibres intact (wool, silk, and various synthetic fibres). I have mixed this solution form scratch using the following recipe:
59g Aluminium sulphate
125g meyprogum thicker*
20g glycerol
55g water

*to make the thickener mix:
100g powdered meyprogum
900g hot water

After the burnout have been mixed I screen printed it on blended fabrics (50 cotton/ 50 polyester), waited for it to dry and heat set (you could also do the same with an iron) the fabric for 2.5 minute (note thicker fabrics such as jeans and velvet take double this time). Here is what I got ... 

















This is the textile studio at NSCAD


                                                                                               Here is my swatch