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.