Here it is! Now to try to get it to dry flat and contemplate whether or not to give it a final wash. There's still a bit of loose indigo powder that's rubbing off on my fingers but I'm not sure I want to take the chance of having that migrate too much in a… Continue reading untied/unstitched
The cloth finally went in the indigo today -- five dips at five minutes each, then a final pH-neutralizing soak in vinegar water. The indigo vat as mixed was sitting at pH 12.5 so I added fructose to bring it down to 11.5. That's still high for dyeing silk but I figure my warp has… Continue reading dye day
After cutting my yardage off the loom and giving it a quick wet-finish, I spent some time trying to decide what "shape" it should take in the final work. I ended up deciding on a hanging double-width panel (with a "display" area for indigo shibori something like 27" square), with the remaining cloth to be… Continue reading Stitching; vat
Well. Some time has passed since that last post -- for the most part I've been tied up with a lot of writing (mainly for research funding proposals and grant management) and finishing up my winter quarter teaching. Of course we've now been hit (along with the rest of the world) by COVID-19, and here… Continue reading Shelter-in-place
Last weekend I decided to switch up the loom configuration to weave a different pattern. There's still a lot of warp left so I didn't touch anything about the threading, but I had picked this particular threading because it supported a pretty diverse range of patterns with different tie-ups. The re-tie to a new treadling… Continue reading Re-tie
Last week I found some time to perform some preliminary studies on a sample of indigo-dyed cotton fabric. I first took some representative optical microscope images to get a sense of the distribution of dye in the cotton fibers. Below left is an image at 103x and on the right an image at 1010x. System… Continue reading indigo up close
I really wanted to take advantage of the winter holiday break to get a solid start on the woven component(s) for this project, which meant choosing and preparing yarns, dressing the loom, starting the cloth, and getting into a steady groove to weave some yardage. After a whirlwind trip to Washington DC at the end… Continue reading ready set go…
I think I'm ready to start working on some cloth. Browsing through handweaving.net I found a set of drafts that share a 98-end threading (#63401, #63375, #61552, #60935, ...) that would provide a nice range of patterns in light color contrast for subsequent dyeing, although the tie-ups would need to be changed among them...
With a tool like a loom, oftentimes the primary barrier to starting a new project is the need to finish a previous project. This week I finally finished a small scarf project that I started back in August, using naturally dyed wool yarns I brought back from Iceland. My loom is finally free!
The intermateriality:redox installation project builds on some small-scale studies I started last summer. Two of the studies will be shown in an exhibition at Blue Line Arts in Roseville, CA in Jan-Feb 2020. Intermateriality Study 1 (left) / Intermateriality Study 2 (right); Hideo Mabuchi (2019)
Intermateriality:Redox 