caracolina

Needless to say, John and I didn’t make much progress since last week because of our weekend trip and natural dye workshop, but the fun part of Sharie’s weaving class is the community weaving experience and Sharie’s show and tell at the end of class. Every week she brings some sample rugs to explain techniques, styles, and to point out weaver’s mistakes sometimes. Here she is “modeling” a Navajo rug dress.

Our last day was spent finishing up the sample cards and winding the last mini-skeins before heading home in the early afternoon. We left with over thirty different shades of beautiful, plant-dyed yarns.

Here is a link to my Flickr set for the whole workshop.

After beginning our second day here at the Blue River Retreat with another great breakfast and morning walk it was back to the dye pots for me. Today we focused on post-mordanting with copper and tin as well as trying out a variety of exhaust baths and combinations of them, with exciting results. All of a sudden the number of samples ballooned and we spent quite some time filling out the sample cards, attaching yarn samples, and winding our mini-skeins to take home.

Here is a link to my Flickr set for the whole workshop.

Mr. Wise and I drove up to the Blue River Retreat (near Alpine, AZ) yesterday afternoon. We are staying in one of three Windstream travel trailers so that I can attend a three-day natural dye workshop held by Jane (a.k.a. Janie) Hoffman, an expert tapestry weaver and dye master, with five other women. Two of them I already knew – Sally and Susan from Spirited Hands Studio in Tucson. They were the instructors of the felting workshop my mother and I attended earlier this yearn at the Fibers Through Time conference, also in Tucson. I also met Sandy who was staying in the cabin at the retreat. She had been helping Jane prepare for the workshop washing and premordanting yarns as well as prepping dye materials.

On the first day the group split up in three teams and started four dye baths: asparagus fern, madder root with a “shot” of cochineal and a “dash” of washing soda, as well as mistletoe and broom snakeweed. We dyed a total of 1 pound or 4 skeins per dye bath (two types of natural, bleached, grey) plus some sample silk hankies. 8 of these skeins we considered “done” today, the rest will move on to post-mordant baths tomorrow. 

Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun! Since I decided to try a two-faced rug this time I needed to use three heddles along with my shed stick as opposed to only one. Two-faced rugs have a different design or pattern on each side and are thicker than usual rugs (they are traditionally used for saddle blankets). The heddles are tied to the warp strings in a variety of patterns (e.g. every fourth string) and it took some time to get it all straightened out so I could start weaving. While the others were already way into their first inch I needed to start with an inch of “special rows” (two over-two under as opposed to one over-one under) and by the end of the class I only had about half an inch of those. I’m a bit unsure how this is going to work out, but it doesn’t hurt to add a bit of challenge. Actually I added another challenge – side selvedge cords which I had Navajo-plied from Brown Sheep yarn on my wheel.

In other great news – John surprised me by picking up an umbrella swift and ball winder for me while we were at class at the Fiber Factory.

On the way home we saw some rain with thunder and lightning. Of course by the time we got home it was all over and there actually hadn’t been any rain at all at our house.

Sonal and her mom invited us to dinner tonight. We couldn’t actually remember the last time we’d been over for dinner, but it must have been 1-2 months. This time we feasted on pav bhaji, one of our favorites, especially the way Sonal and her mom make it. Lucky me also was also able to snag a lunch portion for another day. This is one dish John has never attempted to make at home, no idea why.

After dinner we chatted while John was doing some maintenance on the family PC. There was a funny moment when a chat window popped up and one of Khusboo’s friend’s wanted to say hello. John pretended to be Khush for a few minutes but even with all of his “youth-talking” Satchi still thought something weird was going on. Khushboo and Hemu were both at home, although intently studying. Hemu was preparing for a college test the next day and Khushboo was working on some Algebra problems for high school, which I was able to help with just a little bit. I liked Algebra in school, but it takes me a while to get back into it because I haven’t done it in such a long time. For my associates degree I had been lucky to aptitude test myself right past this stuff into Calculus.

We’ve been wanting to check out the Salt River area near Power Road/Bush Highway in Mesa ever since our Navajo weaving instructor Sharie mentioned it would be a good spot to harvest salt cedar sticks. We use these sticks as shuttles and shed sticks in our weaving because they are relatively thin and, most importantly, straight. Salt cedar or tamarisk (genus tamarix, family tamaricaceae) is a non-native and rather invasive shrub that grows along riverbeds here in the Southwest, so cutting their branches is not frowned upon. For no real good reason we had never been down to that area, although (as we found out today) it is very pretty. However… we didn’t find any salt cedar. We even asked some National Forest folks (the parking lots, picknick tables, etc are part of Tonto National Forest) and they couldn’t help us. Oh well, we had a nice time just getting out early and checking out the place. I hope we can come back some time and picknick down here.

Later today we took a look around historic downtown Glendale. Years ago, we visited some of the “antique” shops there, which I enjoyed, and since I’m looking for a few “old-fashioned” items I thought it would be fun to go back. Sadly, a number of them have since closed down and not a lot of them are open on Sundays during Summer, and to top it off – a lot of what they sell nowadays isn’t really old, it just looks old. But, we still had a good time and a nice chat with a lady in one of the stores.

I spun and plied a batt I made myself at Yarn School in Spring. The thing with this batt was that I already spun half of it but I hated how it turned out so thick. I wondered – can it be respun? And it worked! I pulled it apart in pieces of about 1 arm’s length and predrafted them by unwinding them. The result wasn’t perfectly even but looked a lot nicer than what I had before. I then spun the other half and plied. For some reason that took forever! I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but when I ply it seems as if I’m treadling uphill, probably because I’m holding on to the yarn to add more twist before letting it go on the bobbin, but if I don’t do that it ends up underplied. Ack!

On the rug front – mark II rug is only inches away from the end. Sadly that doesn’t mean much because Navajo weaving gets more and more time-consuming as the rug approaches the finish line as it were. On the up side – the sides look a lot more straight in the top half than the bottom half. I might be finally getting the hang of it!

I stumbled across a test which is supposed to tell you whether you would be a good wife or husband if you lived in the 1930s. Well, you might have guessed I am a failure as a 1930s wife… but as a husband…

59 As a 1930s husband, I am Superior Take the test!

This is my third weaving class, this time with Celia and John. Tonight we worked on our warps so that we can create the heddles next week and get weaving. This is the biggest group yet – 8 people. Lucky for us and instructor Sharie, Mary Walker of Weaving in Beauty likes to hang out and help.