nemo ignorat

Pigment painting

Today, a student and I had fun with kakishibu and iron oxide pigments on old table cloth and coarse linen. My student leaned more towards middle African inspired motives (the two in the middle) whereas I tended more towards circles and dots. The colours are not finished yet. Kakishibu and the pigments take several weeks or months to develop and I am looking forward to how they will change. 

spinning

Spinning is a craft I tend to when I really need to slow down. Stitching and sewing is slow as well but more purposeful than spinning. (And I tend to fall into a kind of addicted trance with sewing and stiching which is stressful in itself.) With spinning I just make yarn. And when I begin at the beginning and wash and card and comb the fibre as well, things begin to really slow down. So this is what I mostly do these days. OK, I also had some students here for indigo dyeing, I build several high raised beds and planted some tomatoes and salad and such, but craft wise it was mostly washing fleece, picking, and so on.

I  showed you the combed and carded Bentheimer Landschaf  a while ago. Well, I decided to stick with combing but combing is made easier when you just card it beforehand, so I use my picker, fluff the fibre, card them on the hand cards and then comb them on my small handheld combs. After two spindles worth of thicker yarn, I thought really thin yarn might be nicer and now I stick to the thin yarn. Once plied, I hope it will still be strong enough for weaving. I'm thinking of some tablet woven bands. But I'll see.

We have really nice weather, so I just use the picker in my backyard. 

And as a contrast fibre, when I feel like something different, I spin cashmere on my supported spindle. Different fibre, different technique.  The cashmere is still from a bag full of Scottish cashmere I bought many years ago. Until about a decade ago, cashmere goats where raised in Scottland as well. They had a huge cottage industry build around it but when import restrictions on Chinese cashmere fell they couldn't compete with the cheap competition. (Which in turn lead to a higher demand for even cheaper cashmere in China, which lead to impoverished farmers, destroyed environment and more and more low quality cashmere flooding the market. But that's another story.)