Premiere Polygonum Pluckings

These are the dried leaves of the Polygonum tinctorium (Dyer's Knotweed, or Japanese Indigo) from the seeds I bought from Rowland Ricketts this spring.  I plucked them from the living plants in our garden patch up in Brooks Park Community Garden last week, and dried them for several days before stripping them from the stalks.  The plants still have lots and lots of leaves growing, but these were the biggest and most promising, so I picked them.

The color of the dried leaves, as you can see, ranges from a dusty dried green to almost navy!

Some of the leaves are not as blue as the others.  I do not know whether this means that they contain less indigotin or whether it just doesn't happen to show for whatever reason.  I suspect from having dyed silk with fresh indigo leaves last year that after the green hangs around for a few weeks, it all turns bluefish, just as the silk I dyed did.  

The multiple greens and blue greens and navys and yellows are beautiful all together.  I love the way the yellow-tan veins on the leaves contrast with the surrounding blue or green surface.

I corrected this photograph to look as close to the actual color of the leaves as possible.  And yes, some of those leaves really are as blue as they look.

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New kitties in the house!

Frank and Stella:

Yes, I'm melting!

The Next Wave

Still having weird issues when I try to upload photos to this blog using this computer.  I'm going to try a different computer...hmm.


Last night I started warping the next run of kitchen towels - this is the one with the bright pistachio-colored perle cotton warp that will be combined with bright orange, pink, and violet wefts.  I had originally settled on a particular draft that turns out, as it happens, to have a much longer repeat than I had thought.  It's only a 10-harness pattern, but it's going to have to wait until I get the compu-dobby reattached and configured, which will happen sometime this year.  This will make a huge difference in what I can weave on my 16 shafts.  That said, I am quite attached to the funky clunky clackety twang of the mechanical dobby.  There's something comforting about the mechanical dobby, despite the limits it has.  And it uses no electricity.


But there's a whole new world of long, long repeats waiting, and also the ability to change to tabby with a press of a button.  I wonder how loud the compu-dobby is when the solenoids are firing; the mechanical dobby is certainly noisy in its own way, but I suspect that it will be a different kind of noisy.  Maybe not bad.


Still spinning on the Rambouillet/Romney wool top I bought last week at the Spinning at the Winery event.  It's wonderful to spin, and the high-speed Alden Amos wheel is the perfect wheel for a very fine wool yarn that has almost the same amount of twist as cotton.

Various preparations

We cleaned up in the garage yesterday.  What a difference!  Now there's room again to wind warp in back of the loom.  I *could* have moved stuff to the side and done the warping, but it was much nicer to just be rid of the mess of things. 




I finally removed the thrums of the Cousin Towels warp while we were binding up cardboard boxes.  And then I swept underneath the loom, and it all looks pretty pristine again.  It's inviting me to warp!!


I also spent a week spinning worsted out of the Rambouillet/Romney blend combed top I got at the Winery Spinning Day last weekend.  I overtwisted the ply and then set the twist under tension, since I am planning to use this as a warp thread for a wool textile.  The weft will be z-spun woolen-spun singles, whose energy should bed nicely with the overplied s-plyed worsted warp.