And now I'm Dyeing!!

 It took about 3 weeks to manage to carry out the plan of picking leaves from my Persicaria tinctorium (formally called Polygonum tinctorium) plants and putting them in a large Kilner jar covered with water. I meant to leave them a few days to ferment, but with the ongoing struggle to do much at all that turned into a week. Nevermind. They started fermenting in the jar, the water at the bottom went yellow and the leaves got pushed to the top by gas bubbles, the water at the top surface turned blue. Today I got the Kilner jar into a bain marie - that involved the stainless steel dye bucket with a metal basket from my pressure cooker under the Kilner jar to ensure it was not in contact with the bottom of the pan. I followed instructions from one of my friends in the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers (who had sent me the plant seeds) and heated it very slowly to just under 71 degrees centigrade and now it's cooling. The next stage involves draining the liquid off the leaves and using an alkali solution (made with Washing Soda from Fibrecrafts) and spectralite... sorry can't remember what I do next, must look at the instructions again. Anyhow, photos soon. By the way, I have also wound a warp... more on that another time.

Ismini Samanidou - art weaver

Shani has discovered this wonderful weaver before me! Do read her excellent blog post.

I was listening to Radio 4 this morning and there, on the travel programme Excess Baggage, Sandy Toskvig (who it turns out weaves on a 4 shaft loom) was talking to weaver Ismini Samanidou, this is a quote from the Excess baggage web page: "about her travels from Mexico to Malaysia and from North Carolina to North Vietnam, looking at different kinds of weaving, the fables behind the fabrics and discovering what a pepper pattern can say about your mother-in-law."

There had a lovely conversation about weaving and the wonder of turning a thread into cloth. I was hoping that this programme would be available to "listen again" on the Radio 4 website, but it isn't at the moment. Something I particularly enjoyed about the programme is the modesty of this weaver, who was talking of the wonder of weaving and the weaving of people different cultures, not about herself although she is a talented and successful weaver so her personality did not obstruct the message.

However, I will talk about this weaver's own work and tell you that Ismini trained as a textile designer at the Royal College of Art and the reason she visited North Carolina is that she had designed a piece of art weaving that was being made on a Jacquard loom at the Oriole Mill in North Carolina, and this piece of work is being exhibited in London at the Jerwood Space 10th June to 19th July, and goes to Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh for August & September. There's more about the weaving exhibition (including some pictures) on this website: http://www.isminisamanidou.com/

I found more about her at: http://www.hiddenartcornwall.com/designermakers/textiles/isminisamanidou

And on this gallery website, where there are some good pictures, but to find them you have to first click on the text which is too small to read (this makes it zoom up to readable size) then there is another link: http://www.willslanegallery.co.uk/weaving.htm

I found some biographical stuff:

Ismini Samanidou, born in Greece 1977
1996-97 Camberwell College of Arts Foundation Studies in Art & Design
1997-2000 Central Saint Martins, B.A. (Hons) Textiles
2001-3 Royal College of Art, M.A. in Constructed Textiles.

New links to my weaving pages

I had an e-mail last week from a weaving friend asking where I had written about lashing-on. I couldn't find it myself straight off, in fact I had to use Google to find an entry in my own blog!

So now, for my own use and for the benefit of anyone else who can't find old entries, I have made a page to index my blogs about loom set up and weaving. See top left.

Yes, I've done a couple of other pages with links as well, UK weaving blogs and the web pages of professional handweavers in the UK.

I've also been writing a few book reviews for Amazon and joined Ravelry (Dot-knits).

But no weaving...

Why? I've got 'flu. Don't tell me swine flu is contained, I don't believe it!!

This one is more persistent than severe, but bad enough to stop me doing much - it's very limiting if you can't get your brain to concentrate on anything for more than 10 mins before needing to rest - but on the other hand it's surprising what you can do with odd ten minutes here and there.

I've found I can do a bit of long draw spinning, a bit of patchwork sewing (a quilt entirely handsewn that I started 8 years ago, maybe I'll finish it this year) a bit of reading, and hunting out and ordering some more books(!). This little stint has tired me out again, excuse me while a shut my eyes a bit.

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