What should I do with my eri silk? Dye it with mud, of course

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Because WP doesn’t seem to have a way of doing this now …
[sidebar]
Many cultures have traditional methods of colouring textiles (and other things, but I’m only interested in textiles) with mud or soil.
In some traditions the colour is actually a stain: the particles that colour the textiles are suspended in a medium such as soy milk that is applied to the textile. The soy milk acts like a glue, holding the particles onto the textiles and protecting them when it dries; if the medium is removed by washing or wearing the colour will leave with it. In other traditions the mud or, more accurately, minerals in the mud, are dyes that form chemical bonds to the textiles or to mordants applied to the textiles for permanent or semi-permanent colour. [sidebar/]

The back story
I came across a source for ‘peace silk’ cocoons reared in the UK (no name because he’s no longer producing cocoons for sale). I bought some eri cocoons (Samia ricini or S. cynthia ricini) because, well, because I could. A Google search for different ways of preparing Eri cocoons for hand spinning also found the dorozome dyeing technique using volcanic mud to colour Eri tsumugi silk to weave oshima tsumugi fabric. [tsumugi silk is spun from the discontinuous silk of cocoons with holes or strands broken by the emerging adult moths, often known as ‘peace silk’.]

VOLCANIC MUD on SILK? If you know me you know I was doomed as soon as I read about it.

Dorozome
Dorozome is a traditional mud dyeing technique from the small volcanic island of Amami Oshima at the southern end of the Japanese archipelago. I’ve watched a lot of videos; if you want to see the technique as used in Japan, Evan Kinori’s video shows more of the process than most.
Basically the material to be dyed (fabric or yarn) is mordanted with a red-orange tannin extracted from the wood of Indian hawthorn (Rhaphiolepis umbellata), known as techi in the Okinawan dialect or sharinbai in Japanese (I think). The material is submerged and manipulated in a muddy pond of iron-rich grey volcanic mud, then dried and rinsed. Repeat the process as many times as necessary to get the desired shade of brown/grey/black.

What I did
I needed iron-rich mud. Fortunately there is a lot of ironstone in Northeast England; ironstone and coal were the foundation stones of the Industrial Revolution. I found a chalybeate spring (a spring of iron-rich water) on a public right of way, filled three medium zip-lock bags with a mix of mud, water and rotting vegetation, discovered that my daypack would only hold two, so put the third and the rubbish I’d removed from the spring in a carrier bag and hauled the lot back to the car. The lethal-to-animals party balloon released by some idiot somewhere was huge, wet and heavy.

The spring, with its own bucket sunk into the mud. I left it in place full of water in case it’s for the sheep. A hint of balloon at top left (it was huge).

I needed tannin. I want this to be theoretically local, so I needed a tannin I could find locally. Native UK hawthorn wood is not orange and has no reputation as a mordant, so I opted for oak galls. Not wanting to hunt them down for the trial run, I bought some from Chiz at Froe Wood Coppice Products (he has lots of other cool stuff including lime bast).

The process is simple
Crush the oak galls. I soaked them 24 hours to extract the tannin as a pale brown liquid: heating results in a darker brown tannin that might obscure the iron tint from the mud.
Scour the material to be dyed to remove anything that might interfere with absorption of the tannin.
Soak the materials in the tannin. I left them 24 hours to fully wet and absorb the various compounds from the oak galls.

The oak gall mordant with soaking fabrics.

Squash the materials into the muck and water in the bucket, lift up and peer at them hopefully, then squash around in the mud again. Repeat for about a minute, then squeeze out the excess fluid, pick off some of the vegetable matter, watch them go grey! and leave to dry outside before rinsing and washing and rinsing.

The Bucket. It’s a lot smaller than it looks, the camera exaggerates its size if not its importance.

The cellulose fabrics: at top, linen (coarse weave) and two cottons as they look dry after mordanting in the oak gall solution. Below, samples of the same fabrics roughly rinsed after mud dyeing.

OMG IT WORKED

How does this work?
According to my reading, no one is absolutely certain how this works because there are Too Many Things involved. The chemical reactions are roughly similar to those that make medieval oak gall ink, so we know that oak gall mordant isn’t just tannic acid, it’s also gallic acid, pyrogallol, syringic acid and more, known simply as gallotannins. The gallotannins contain hydroxyl groups that happily bind to hydroxyl groups in the cellulose fibres and to metal ions, thus binding the iron to the fabric.

Ironstone can contain iron in many forms, including iron oxide (rust), magnetite, and other oxides and sulphides, none of which are soluble. Iron miners use heat to extract the iron from the rocks; we have to thank bacteria for the iron in the mud that dyes fabric. Bacteria and other organisms living in wet soil and peat around the ironstones consume oxygen and release acids as they break down organic matter. In those conditions iron loses electrons to become ferrous iron aka Fe2+ or IronII. IronII is soluble: water moving through the rocks will transport it away through the soil and the peat as long as the reducing conditions are maintained. When the IronII reaches the open air the oxygen and/or chemotrophic bacteria transform it to ferric iron aka Fe3+ or IronIII which is an insoluble black particle. If the dyer is lucky, the anaerobic conditions persist in the mud (perhaps there are bacteria rotting organic matter?) to maintain a supply of IronII ready to dye things.

In some places the chemotrophs create an oil-slick rainbow on the iron-rich waters and soils that is beautifully set off by the rich reds and oranges of rusting IronIII. I thought I had a picture of this but I can’t find it, so here’s a blog post from the University of Florida.

When people using natural dyes ‘sadden’ a colour with a tannin mordant followed by ferrous sulphate aka copperas, they’re using a shortcut through this process: ferrous sulphate (FeSO4) releases the soluble ferrous IronII which is converted to ferric IronIII and bound to the fabric.

The first samples. At top the oak gall mordanted cellulosics to show the starting colour. Below that linen; cotton; another cotton; mordanted handspun Bombyx silk; unmordanted handspun Bombyx silk (which did NOT dye, but rather trapped a bit of IronIII that promptly rusted). Bottom right, mordanted white wool.

So: if I’ve understood the process correctly, the process that gives me beautiful warm iron-greys on fabric is the same reduction/oxidation that gives me indigo blue.

It’s appropriate that the first thing I dyed for real, as it were, was a scarf dyed and stencilled with fresh leaf Japanese indigo. The result was a perfect example of the fresh leaf on silk but far too bright for me to wear. I absolutely love it now.

To left, another silk scarf to show the turquoise original colour.

A new rabbit hole: coiled basketry

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It’s all Sally Pointer‘s fault. I was just quietly playing nicely with lime bast and nettle, then she wrote a book and then she co-hosted a lime bast working day with Chiz Harward of Froe Wood Coppice Products where I had a lot of fun and encountered things made of bast fibres that I hadn’t thought of making.
Baskets.
I have clear memories of the boho stores (we called them ‘hippy stores’) of the early 1970s, full of tie-dye t-shirts, Nepalese silver trinkets, psychedelic posters and southeast Asian and African craft items. Lots of coiled baskets, stacks of them in the corners or lined up full of stuff I can’t clearly visualise (polished rocks? soaps?), everything smelling so strongly of patchouli that you didn’t have to buy any yourself. I miss those days, everything was so new, so shiny, so desirable when seen with young eyes.
It never occurred to me that those baskets were handmade. I had no interest in baskets. Ha.

While we were househunting I spent evenings learning to make cordage from random materials, then learning to make baskets from the cordage.

Sally’s book includes instructions for making a coiled basket: wrap good lime bast around bundles of lime bast too weak for cordage, spiral the wrapped bundle out and up, stitching into the previous row to make a solid structure. I have LOTS of lime bast, I can do that.

The bundle of ‘waste’ lime bast is wrapped with a strip of ‘good’ bast. Stitch into the previous row to create a strong structure; do it more regularly than I did for a more elegant result. The stitching bast should be moistened for strength and flexibility.

It’s messy. Sheds lots of bits of lime bast onto my work desk, onto the floor, into my keyboard, onto my clothes and hence everywhere. Slow work, ideal for an evening in front of the tv, but too messy.
Wait. I can wrap other things with other things. I can wrap tapestry warp thrums (waste yarn produced when the tapestry is cut off the loom) with leftover or waste silk yarns.

This is the epitome of mottanai, the Japanese principle that drives boro repair and modern visible mending: it’s more than regrettable, it’s simply wrong to waste material that can be made into something useful. It’s slow, slow work but pulling the silk yarn tight around the core makes it shine, and the subtle variations in colour are beautiful. Inserts of other colours are the last few scraps of silk spun from fibre I dyed c. 2012, most of it used for tablet weaving. I wonder where that bag is?
You can see from the last photo that the constant handling of the forming basket has raised a halo from the silk yarn, making it fuzzy. This offended me: I wanted the stitching to be clear and crisp. I knew the fuzz could be singed off …

Many years ago we took Sara Lamb to the Camenzind silk mill in Switzerland to see commercial silk spinning. The spun yarn was de-gassed, the yarn passed at high speed over a red-hot iron plate to scorch off any halo so the final yarn was crisp and glossy. When we returned to the UK we tried to do something similar by passing spun yarn at high speed past a steady flame (heating iron red-hot on my cooker was NOT GOING TO HAPPEN). Needless to say we weren’t very successful, although we did have a lot of fun.

But how to do it? Careful application of my cook’s blowtorch, that’s how. Happy to risk everything in pursuit of perfection, that’s me.

Perfect.
Well. It’s not the shape I wanted. I had to undo and rework the little opening. Six strands of 18/2 cotton work up (relatively) quickly, but the coil is relatively coarse. Maybe if I make the bundle smaller?

Practice makes perfect. Four strands, wrapped with precious thrums of Sara Lamb’s hand-dyed, handspun silk.

Another tapestry. Water again.

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Finishing this is what spurred me to post the other tapestries yesterday. (Well, finishing this plus the Facebook suspension. Easier to share there than here, but we are where we are, and you wouldn’t have a story time there. Are you sitting comfortably?)

I’ve been taking pictures of water and shorelines for about many years, first as memories, then as inspiration for colour palettes and colour blending: how would I combine a variety of coloured yarns to create a blend that brings a wave or ripple to life.
In 2023 I enjoyed a one-day tapestry workshop weaving water with Anna Wetherell at Farfield Mill, mostly because I needed a push to start tapestry weaving again. We took pictures of the river from the mill bridge as inspiration for tiny tapestries woven with Anna’s scrap yarns, advice, and encouragement. I can’t remember which bit of which photo I used for this, but I can still see the water.

After that I tried to weave the gold birch leaves drifting in the peat-brown water at the Falls of Falloch, many years ago. It sort of worked, I liked the result even if the leaves are wonky. I took more photos of water. I don’t remember where we were in September this year but I have a photo of the water there.

I warped the little loom, this time using ‘proper’ warp (Liina 12) and started pulling yarns from the tapestry stash. An inch or so up my niggling doubts brought weaving to a halt. Look at the water, look at the tapestry. In the picture the water is alive, it’s moving. The the tapestry is flat. Pretty water colours, but it’s flat. Boring. MOST unsatisfactory. I want it to speak of movement.

I read some books, I did some googling. Mostly I remembered Linda Wallace (probably slightly exasperated by the way I kept asking how things should be done) telling me that I should do whatever I need to do, there are no rules provided the woven structure holds. So… I can build angles into the weave like the angles of the wavelets. I can add nubbly handspun silk to catch the light and make the wavelets dance.

WHOA. Now it’s moving. This is exciting.
But OMG the back. Every one of those patches of colour is a group of four yarns with the start and finish of the bundle hanging out the back. There are many ways to deal with the ends. I tried several, but all of them left the front of the tapestry slightly uneven, with differences in light and shadow that interfered with perception of the movement. I wanted it as near dead flat as possible.

I had an idea. This is a tiny piece to be mounted, the woven structure will not have to cope with the stress and strain of hanging free. I stitched the individual weft bundles down to the surface of the back.

I love the not-quite-random pattern of stitches and bundles. It’s a serendipitous exercise in mark-making. It looks almost like cuneiform, a language, and in a way it is. The text says “What if…”

I assume this is a known technique (it is often said there is nothing new under the sun in textile crafts). It takes forever, or feels like it: 14 bundles stitched in 37 minutes one afternoon. But it works. After blocking, steaming and mounting, the tapestry lies flat.
Looking at it now I think the initial flat bit is a useful contrast to the areas of madness (it felt like madness) later on.

A recognised it as water before the halfway mark.
I love it. It’s another “I can’t believe I made this” moment.
I wish it was larger. Well, I know what to do about that. Use a bigger loom to wind a bigger warp. But first I’ll admire this again. I’m so much more fortunate than you, I can see it for real, not a bad photo in the bad light as Storm Chandra batters the house.

Tapestry first steps: the Winter Hare and after

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I have no memory of looking at a tapestry or a picture of a tapestry and thinking ‘I could do that’. Maybe Sara Lamb’s book Woven Treasures planted a seed. In 2015 I remember asking A to cut the centre out of a small piece of plywood to make a tiny (insanely tiny, really) portable loom, which I warped with scrap tatting cotton to needleweave a tiny 1″ square using scrap lengths of handspun silk on a flight somewhere. I don’t have a picture of it, but I remember finding throwing away that fragment and host of other small memories when packing to return to the UK.

In Canada in 2019 I was fortunate enough to be invited to join a group of tapestry weavers and fibre artists who met every Wednesday. The further I am from that time and place, the more clearly I see how much I learned about the sheer hard work of creating and the value of collaborative learning. I listened and learned as Linda Wallace and others drew cartoons, took photos, wove, unwove, offered up, blended, exchanged ideas and yarn, laughed, stopped for thought and coffee, and drew me in.
Those Wednesdays were wonder-full.
I miss those friends, their curiosity and drive to create, more than I can say.

In 2020 I put my sashiko to one side, bought a small Mirrix loom, found an image in my head and began.
This is the only image that shows most of the cartoon (the drawing held behind the warp). It also show something of the scrap handspun yarn I used.

I look at these photos and remember the sheer frustration, every day. The cartoon was IN THE WAY when I manipulated the warp and every time the paper moves even a couple of millimetres I have to notice and move it back or the weaving will be the wrong shape. I tried drawing on the warps: the felt pen bled and blurred. I tried paired magnets to hold the cartoon (instead of tape, then stitching): if they were tight enough not to slip freely I couldn’t get them apart.
Working with crochet cotton and handspun I had no established guidelines for the number of weft yarns in the bundle for the sett and size of warp yarn. I was winging it with no experience, but I had the greatest good luck in the world: I could ask someone for advice. Sometimes it was as simple as ‘keep going’.

I learned that I had to trick the eye into seeing curves. I *hated* the steps created by the structure but found they were masked by the magic of the final image if it worked.
I learned that the weft I placed and beat into place will be further compressed by the beating of weft above it. If I wove exactly the shape I wanted it was squashed, stretched sideways by the additional compression by the time I’d woven another couple of centimetres. Slippery crochet cotton allows the weft to slide down even more than traditional seine twine. I lost track of the times I ripped back and rewove the head of the hare.
I ran out of colours but as I had no plan for colours that was easily dealt with.

This is the only photo I have of the finished piece. The compression is annoying. The nose is still too short. The tail is still too flat. But when I look at the photo I still feel the sense of disbelief that I, *I* could make something that good. I still love it and, while I miss it, I was honoured to swap it for Linda Wallace’s postcard garden.

In 2021 I began to acknowledge the reality, that Canada was no longer where I wanted to be. Images strike more strongly than words.

My head was full of Scotland.

Now my head is full of light on moving water, leaves drifting in peat-brown water.

The next one will have a post of its own sometime in the next week or so. I could show you the new empty warp on the big Mirrix but where’s the fun in that? Wait until I find the courage to start something.

ETA: solved. One of Safari’s content blocker settings stopped the form working. WordPress won’t let me add categories or tags at the moment so I can’t create a new ‘Tapestry’ category or tag. I’ve restarted, even tried a different keyboard, but no. Technology hates me.

I’m still here

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My Facebook page has been suspended; I honestly don’t know why. I should have heard a yay or nay from my appeal three days ago. If I don’t hear anything within 180 days the suspension becomes permanent. Apparently I’m not alone; the Forbes article linked below says many legitimate accounts are being thrown out in the continuing AI bot purge. Another reason to hate AI?

It could be worse. r/facebook is full of people who’ve lost a decade or more of personal photos and contacts; the appeal process has probably choked on the volume. I haven’t lost anything other than the ability to see what you’re doing, and learning from environmental pages. On the other hand I’m not watching the monetisation of interactions drive online culture deeper into the cesspit every day, so the world has instantly become a brighter place.

Dealing with the weft ends on the little tapestry is making slow progress (14 weft groups in 37 minutes yesterday), but I love the texture and pattern it creates.

I can’t access other Meta products (Messenger and Instagram) either so if you want to contact me please use email or the ‘Contact’ form here.

I’ll probably blog occasionally about what I’m making, but WordPress is too formal for quick ‘come for a walk and a bit of landscape history’ posts. If you miss any of that, let FB know.
I’ll be here making things or walking the hills whether or not I can share the experience with you.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/07/20/facebook-deletes-10-million-accounts-and-warns-the-purge-will-go-on/

From the archive: A ‘Saxon’ indigo fermentation vat

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A poor photo (this was 2011) of he indigo vat, some chicken wire on which to drain the dyed fibre,
and my rubber gauntlets.

Searching my ‘Photos’ for something else that happened near the dawn of time, I found a set of videos from 2011 featuring an indigo fermentation vat built following the instructions in J. N. Liles’ The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use.

It’s very strange to hear my voice describing something I only remember when I unearth the
remnants of these dyed locks. I can’t even remember what I made from the rest of them.

Liles’ ‘Fermentation Vat No. 4: Saxon Vat’ (p.86 in my paperback copy) is based on his wife Dales’ theory that the organic matter (suint, skin flakes, manure, dust) in an unscoured fleece might be sufficient to support bacterial fermentation to reduce or eliminate oxygen in an indigo vat. Liles found confirmation of this in J M Matthews Application of Dyestuffs to Textile, Paper, Leather and Other Materials [link to archive.org copy, please donate to support them if you use it] “This is one of the earliest forms of Indigo dyeing in Europe, and is still practiced in the same primitive manner by the peasants of Saxony, where the celebrated Saxon blue is dyed.” [Note that this is not the ‘Saxon Blue’ dyed using sulphuric acid to make indigo sulfonate, which I wrote about here.]

Anyway. I was clearly so thrilled by the results (both smell and dye) of this Saxon vat that I filmed it. The sound is awful and one of the clips is short, but I’ve assembled them as a single video and put it up on Youtube. My first video upload!
Liles ‘Saxon’ Indigo Vat 2011 SD 480p

I have found another video showing how I boosted the vat for another use; I hope to put that up later this week.


Some cautions:
I recall at least one dismal failure of suint cleaning/ Saxon vat. Nothing happened, it just stank. Liles suggests this could be due to trace chemicals from sheep dip or anything else that the vat and its contents might have encountered. pH of the water might matter, too. If you try this, record more info than I scribbled into the margins of my copy of Liles.
Also, I do remember the smell of the natural fermentation vats, especially this one and the sig aka urine vats. It’s powerful. Also, it has to be warm room temperature for fermentation to work in a useful timescale if at all. I think this vat was snuggled up against the bathroom radiator, on the hot water circuit so it was always warm or hot. When I created later vats in the garage I put a ‘brewband’ heater for beer or other brewing on the vat, and put the whole thing in a cardboard box lined with styrofoam and bubble wrap to keep it warm. I think it worked best in the house, though, and it has been agreed that I can try one this year in the master ensuite. I’ve got a bit of dirty fleece and I’m going to order another brew band because this bathroom is much smaller –– and I might have to move the vat outside if it smells as I remember.

Spinning bog cotton aka cotton grass

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Bog cotton aka cotton grass, Eriophorum angustifolium, is now classed not as a grass but as a sedge. It grows in damp, acidic soils across the Northern hemisphere, flowering from May through June, when a dense patch can look like fresh snow lightly scattered on a green hillside. In the hand it does look a bit like cotton (especially if you’ve never seen raw cotton in your hand) so hand spinners inevitably wonder if it could be spun like cotton: how wonderful to gather it from the hillsides to produce a lovely local yarn.

Bog cotton growing on a hillside above Scar House Reservoir, Upper Nidderdale, 16 June 2024.

M. Grieves ‘A Modern Herbal’ (1931) is the standard resource for folklore and uses of European plants. Grieves says of bog cotton https://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/s/sedges39.html

Eriophorum angustifolium (Cotton Grass), with its long white tufts of hair, is very decorative on our bogs and mosses in the middle of summer. The down is used in moorland districts for stuffing pillows, and attempts have been made to employ it as a substitute for cotton, under the name of ‘Arctic Wool,’ thread having been spun from it, but the fibres are more brittle than those of cotton and do not bear twisting as well. Candles and lamp wicks have been made from the down by country people.
In former days the leaves and roots had some reputation in northern countries as a medicine in diarrhoea, as like most members of the Sedge family, they possess considerable astringency.
The name Eriophorum is from the Greek erion (wool) and phero (I bear).”

In ‘A Monograph on the British Grasses’ (1822) George Graves writes

‘Should our Manufacturers be able to overcome the brittle texture of its cottony heads, this plant might then answer the purpose of the grower, as the quantity of this substance is considerable. In some parts of Germany the down has been made into paper, wicks for candles, etc.; and Linneas [Carl Linnaeus aka Carl von Linné, 1707–1778, the Swedish biologist who was “the father of modern taxonomy”‘] remarks, that the Swedish peasants stuff their pillows with it in the place of feathers. This plant is of common occurrence in most of the boggy parts of Great Britain; it flowers in April and produces its downy seeds in July and August.’

Eriophorum angustifolium Common or Many-headed Cotton-Grass from Graves’ Monograph.

‘fibres are more brittle … do not bear twisting as well [as cotton]’ and ‘brittle texture’ doesn’t sound promising.

A tuft of cotton grass in my hand. The long, straight fibres are relatively coarse and stiff. The single seed below it shows why they must be stiff: when the seed is ripe the fibres attached to it open up like a dandelion seed parasol to catch the wind.

Above, dissections of the cotton grass seed heads.
Left: the different lengths of fibres from different regions of the seed head, as well as the head at the centre of the seed head showing the sockets in which the seeds sit.
Right: the seeds sitting at the base of their parasols of fibre.

Cotton-grass fibre without the seeds, which would have been at the tan-coloured base of the tuft.

In the above photo I’ve pulled the small dark seeds off some tufts of fibre, which was quite difficult as the seeds are firmly attached, but there would be a lot of little dark lumps in the yarn if the seeds were not removed.
Look carefully and note that the fibres are significantly thicker at the base than the tips, meaning the tips will twist more easily. When I hand-twisted a couple of seeds-worth of fibre; the tips twisted but the fibres snapped before the twist could travel into the thicker bases (the bases and the twisted tips shown above). This demonstrates what is meant by ‘brittle’ in the description of the fibre: the seed fibres are both stiff and weak, completely inelastic, so they snap rather than twist.

Spinning from a cloud of de-seeded fibre lightly misted with water and allowed to sit 5 minutes.

I tried spinning from several clouds of de-seeded fibre, both fresh (so slightly damp), dry (about a month after gathering), and re-wetted with a mister. The re-wetted were easier, probably because the droplets of water help to hold the fibres together: the moisture did not soften the fibres, which remained stiff and inelastic. It spun in the sense that the twist picks up fibres to bring them into the forming yarn, but because of the stiffness and the variation in fibre thickness the yarn is excessively uneven (see the tiny thin tightly twisted yarn on the spindle hook contrasted with far less twist in the thicker area above.

I could not spin a competent [yarn that does not lengthen under tension] singles. Rotating the spindle in my hand while pulling it away from the fibre mass allowed the twist to make a soft singles; adding more twist to prevent the fibres sliding on each other invariably resulted in the singles snapping before it became competent. When I tried to suspend the 10gm spindle on the singles either a slub slid apart (because the fibres are stiff and smooth) or a thinner area snapped (because the fibres are brittle).
I spun an incompetent singles to make a 2-ply; the 2-ply yarn was almost competent (it lengthened under tension, but slowly) but was easily broken.

‘Almost’ competent 2-ply yarn held between the pins. I can imagine it as candlewick, when the first wax dip would glue the fibres together. But how well would it work? Would it burn?

I put three tea lights in a cast iron pan on low heat on the hob and, when the wax was liquid, I disembowelled one to extract the metal wick holder. I put a length of the cotton grass 2-ply yarn in the holder, put the holder back in the tea light, topped up the wax level and rigged something to hold the rest of the wick upright while the wax cooled. I put another short length of 2-ply to soak up a puddle of wax.

So the fibres hold wax. I trimmed the tea light wick short, asked my husband to take pictures, then struck a match:

It works well. There was quite a lot of black smoke as the flame grew larger, but I’ve seen that from ‘real’ tea lights.
In conclusion: bog cotton is indeed too stiff and brittle to be a good spinning fibre, and probably wouldn’t make a good pillow or paper for the same reasons, but it can be spun into a fragile yarn suitable for candle wicks.

Bad cotton.

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Over the last few weeks several people have asked a FB spinning group about spinning cotton wool/cotton balls – the things sold for makeup removal – as a cheap, easy to find version of cotton. I said cotton balls aren’t like REAL cotton; they’re made of heavily-processed waste fibres so they won’t make a lovely even yarn but I do enjoy spinning them. I discovered I didn’t have any when I looked for the bag in the stash to take a picture. My local supermarket (this is the UK) also didn’t have any so I added a bag of 100% cotton balls to the Amazon basket.

Can you read the label? It looks like the label on the Amazon website but there are different words: ‘Vacuum packed to reduce packaging size’. Cotton isn’t elastic, it doesn’t rebound to its original shape in the way that wool does. The label claims the cotton balls will expand after the pack is opened, but that seems extremely unlikely.
What to do? I can’t send the stuff back, I’ve opened the pack.

Was this decent cotton before it was abused?

No, and I didn’t expect that it would be. Cotton balls are a way of making money from waste fibre. In the photo below the top fibre is cotton sliver (technical term for the cotton version of what spinners know as wool top) opened to show fibre alignment and nepps. Fibre below it is one of the cotton balls.

At this point spinners are wondering why anyone would bother. Keep reading :-)

Rehabilitating bad cotton
First thing is to encourage the cotton to rebound and expand as much as it can. Heat and moisture help, so I put the balls in a colander over a bowl of steaming water and left it overnight, mixing top to bottom a few times before I went to bed.

That helped but not much. I tried Extreme Steam at the spout of a boiling kettle; do this with real cotton sliver and you can actually see it expand; this, not so much.

Oh well.

How can I prep this for spinning?
The three obvious options are shown in the photo below.
Centre, one of the cotton balls and above it, a couple of the balls unfolded to show the firmly set creases, a truly awful thing to see in cotton, each compacted area will be a difficult or undraftable slub in the yarn. But I can spin this.
To the right, next to the ruler, one of the balls unfolded and then carefully passed through steam from the kettle, allowed to rest, then steamed and rested again. The creases are still visible but it’s an improvement.
At left, five punis. Each is 2 1/2 (3 was too much, 2 seemed ungenerous) cotton balls unrolled and carded on my small Clemes & Clemes handcards. I don’t doff all the fibre onto one card at the end; instead I use a fine knitting needle to roll the fibre off each card, then slide the rolled fibre off. Moisten the needle with just the right amount of spit to catch the fibres at the start of the roll.

There wasn’t a lot of difference between spinning the unfolded fibre and the steamed unfolded fibre. Spinning with the tahkli (a support spindle with high speed good for spinning fine fibres) yielded a finer yarn but dealing with the slubs was more fiddly than spinning on the Majacraft Rose; both methods yielded a good somewhat slubby singles that plied up nicely.

Spinning a singles from the unfolded cotton ball on the Majacraft Rose lace flyer.

Carding the cotton for the punis opens and rearranges the fibres, so I’d hoped they would draft more easily even if the yarn was still slubby. They did, but not in a good way. The cotton drafted easily into a succession of long slubs that, when double-drafted for a competent yarn tended to snap in the thin sections between the slubs. My theory is that the additional carding, even if only 2 brushes of the cards to spread the fibre evenly, did too much damage: too many of the fibres had been weakened or shortened.

Spinning a singles from a puni made from cotton balls. Note the long, large slubs.

Verdict
I’d spin this from unfolded balls, steamed once or twice and allowed to rest before I spin them. Why bother? Because the end result is a good and interesting yarn.
On the left, tahkli-spun; on the right, wheel-spun. Both are competent. The really fluffy bits of the wheel-spun are the puni slubs; these will probably shed fibre and pill even if a weave structure locks the fibres into place, and they might fail under warp tension. So if I was spinning this for use in knitting or weaving I’d avoid slubs this large and loose.
Best way to do that is buy nicer cotton balls, avoiding ones that have been vacuum-packed. The ones I bought from Superdrug in Canada were lovely.

My new scarf

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In March 2020, just before COVID, he and I went to New York, sharing one carry-on bag (we travel light and fast). I’ve just checked my calendar to see how long we were there; in my memory it’s both forever and no time at all, but in fact it was an intense fun- and food-filled ten days. One was spent walking from our hotel in The Bowery to see Japanese textiles at Sri Threads, with lunch at a Polish restaurant that we still remember for fabulous food and our first Żywiec beer. I’d been following Stephen @Sri for years and his collection did not disappoint. The wisteria bast fabric, the museum-grade boro were beyond my means, but I brought home some wonderful and meaningful textiles including a worn but very beautiful sakiori obi. My plan was to cut it and make a series of small bags to showcase the fabric, but I found I just could not put the scissors to it. Not just because it’s a wonderful long beautiful thing, but because it was still a thing. It wasn’t so worn that it couldn’t be used in its entirety. And also because this was made by someone’s hands as that single thing. Someone dismantled the garments for fabric, cut strips, wound that warp, warped the loom, chose or simply took strips to weave as weft. There is no repeat. When I’ve woven random yarns like this I’d sometimes pause to admire some unexpectedly beautiful progression: did the person who wove this pause, and for which colours?

Packing my workroom for the move made clear to me how many unfinished projects require my attention. They weigh me down: i am finishing some and disposing of others. This beautiful thing could become a striking if somewhat long scarf to be loved and admired into the future if I repaired it to withstand light use. 

Obi?
An obi is a Japanese belt, traditionally a woven fabric but modern obi may be made of many materials. There are obi (several types) for women and for men; men’s obi are narrower, longer (men wrap three times around the waist, women two) and usually more sombre in colour than those worn by women.

Left, an 1890s photo of one woman tying a complex obi knot. Right, a modern man’s kaku obi (my reading suggests this would be more stylish with the knot worn a little to the left).

My obi is roughly 15cm/6″ wide and 3m/9.8′ long, the standard dimensions of a hanhaba or ‘half width’ everyday casual woman’s obi. If that’s what it is, given the age of the obi, it would have been wound unfolded twice around the waist then tied with a simple over-and-under knot.

Sakiori: an examplar of mottanai
Meaning something like ‘what a waste/shame’ in the sense of ‘don’t be wasteful’, mottanai is a Japanese philosophy born of poverty and respect for crafts and materials. There is no need (it is inappropriate and disrespectful) to buy new if the old can be repaired, re-used or recycled. Garments can be repaired and remade for further use and when repair is not possible the fabric itself still has value: it can be cut into strips for use as weft in a new woven fabric (sakiori) or even unravelled, sound weft thread by weft thread to be re-used as weft in a new zanshi (‘leftover thread’) fabric.

A burn test suggests the black warp is silk; it burned briefly and sullenly with the scent of burnt hair. The wefts are strips of at least 23 different silks ranging in colour from palest grey to various blacks with grey patterning. The narrowest weft stripe is 3 passes of a pale grey similar to that in the middle of the image above (but the strip is thinner); the widest is 26 passes of a blue and white silk similar to that near the bottom of the image. A true vivid deep purple is the least common colour, only 5 stripes. Most of the silks are rich shades of brown combined with greys and blacks.

Think for a minute about the possible age of these fabrics. Folk textiles are difficult to date, but sakiori fabric is no longer widely woven. The obi is worn beyond use, from long use. As were, probably, the garments dismantled and woven into it. If it was woven at the beginning of the 20th century, the fabrics may date from the 19th century. All those years, all those people making and wearing the garments.

The photo above shows some of the damage. The worst is the selvedges, in many areas eroded to nothing but worn ends of weft strips. Within the body of the obi the warp is worn or has disappeared entirely over bumps in the weft, creating weak points where the weft strips part. There is no central wear line, so it was not folded in use. At one end there are large open holes several cm wide. It might be that this is the result of wear due to knotting, or it could simply be moth or beetle damage.

Silk threads for stitching.
Vintage Japanese silk fabric for patches.

I tried various blanket and buttonhole stitches on the damaged selvedges, then unpicked most of them leaving only two small areas to remind me that they don’t work, the pattern and texture is inappropriate. In the end I repaired the edges as I did the weak areas in the fabric, re-weaving the warp over-and-under. I worked as close to the edge of the obi as I dared before locking every second or third stitch back into previous stitches. Where the weft fabrics were too badly damaged to hold the new warp I stitched patches of vintage silk, indigo blue or zanshi multicolour and gold. I used 60/2 grey silk where I did not want my stitching to show and Sajou Fil au Chinois where I wanted the repairs to glow like kintsugi gold.

I like the end result enough that I thought of signing it but that seems disrespectful to the person or people who made the obi. Instead I stitched a yatagarasu, the three-legged lucky crow-guide that may be sent by the gods, on the largest patch. Everyone can do with luck and guidance these days.

Why a blue horse?

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The blue horse is finished. It had been taking shape in my head for several months while we sold the house and a lot of other things in Canada, packing to move back to the UK. Ever since September 2022, when I found the blue horse in my mother’s house.

My mother was a hoarder and had slowly slipped deeper into dementia over decades. It’s not a good combination. Now she was in hospital, unlikely to leave. I flew to Edmonton to help my brother with the initial clearance of the food and other perishables; five full days of emptying cupboards of decades-old food, filling bags with decades of recycling, sorting waist-high stacks of paper, clothing, stained or disintegrating, into ‘keep’ or ‘dispose’ to wait until he had authority to remove things other than rotting food.
I will never forget the smell, the mundane horrors in every room, the repeated shocks as long-forgotten finds brought long-buried memories to the surface. Three bottles of the awful purple liqueur she bought for teenage me, now leaking crystallised sugar into Chinese lacquer cabinets. The Ernestine Tahedl that hung above the couch in St Albert, then on the stairs in the next house. A glass like the one she threw at my stepfather, scotch running down the wall. And in a kitchen drawer, battered but still familiar, the precious blue Dala horse that had lived out of reach on top of the refrigerator in St Albert. I remembered the shape so clearly, the bright colours, the blue. I wanted it so much but at the same time I wanted to possess nothing from that house, nothing to tie me to the present horror. I cleaned the horse and left it.


@@@


I thought about how to make a blue horse. It would be fabric, because that’s what I’ve taught myself to shape. What sort of fabric, how to cut the pattern pieces to make the right shape. While we hunted for a house in the UK, moving from holiday let to holiday let, I concluded it should be some sort of wool and bought a metre of remaindered blue boiled wool coating from a fabric warehouse. It’s not the blue I was looking for, but it was blue enough. I drew the shape I wanted as a side view, then imagined the pieces needed to make it three-dimensional and drew those. I cut the main pieces to start, the body sides and the back, adding a seam allowance as I cut.

The pattern pieces for the horse, drawn on notebook pages and scrap paper.

Sample stitching made clear that a ‘normal’ seam stitched along the figure outline with seam allowances turned inward was far too bulky for this, so I carefully trimmed off the seam allowance and looked for alternative stitches to secure the pieces held edge-to-edge. The one I chose from Pinterest may be a variant of ‘Open Cretan’. I had a small selection of embroidery floss brought for a different project; I chose a slightly variegated blue that mostly matches the fabric. The stitches show; it’s a slightly Frankenstein horse, but it’s honest. And it came alive in my hands as I worked. Not the stolid wooden real horse but a lively softer horse, its head tilted as it looks at something interesting.

Not the right blue, but blue enough.

Dala horses are folk art from Sweden (there are similar horses from other Scandinavian countries). The 20th-century versions are glossy, brightly-coloured with swirling painted decoration in white, green, yellow, red and blue. I tried to replicate the paintwork on mine; it was wrong, too bright, too much a bad copy. I tried some artistic primitive decoration, copper silk spirals; it might work well for another horse, another time but was insufficiently Dala. I thought again. This isn’t a REAL Dala horse, it’s a memory made real. A ghost, of sorts. So I stitched hints of the Dala decoration in shades of blue suitable for a memory. Chain stitch is easy to work on felt and is extremely effective. On the neck of the horse the curves not only flatten the area that is the mane, but make the fabric wave as if it were moving.

My much younger sister sent me a text when she saw one of the progress photos, unembellished, on Facebook. “That looks like the blue horse!” she said, “I found it in the kitchen of mum’s house and brought it home, I remember it in the kitchen when I was little”. She sent me pictures of the battered and worn blue horse, a memory of her childhood as it is of mine. Now there are two blue horses.


I thought perhaps the blue horse should have a rider, but once the rider was shaped (felted merino, no armature) enough to offer up it was clear the horse carries only memories. So now the rider waits for me to think of something else to do.

I have a lot of blue boiled wool left. Something else is bound to want to become real.