Kanzashi

When I saw Kanazashi in Bloom on I forget whose blog, I knew I was in trouble. I really have a thing for round things, and for radial symmetry. The Yo-Yo Obsession of 2008 made that abundantly clear. The Martha Stewart ribbon rosettes came next. But this is better. Much better. And what a great use for little bits of dyed or otherwise irresistible fabric!

Diane Gilleland's directions are clear, complete, and well illustrated. Her example projects didn't really do it for me, but there's a wide range which gave me some good ideas. I did a little surfing and the clearest tutorial I found was a set of pictures by SpanglySpangle on Flickr and her quick little video (no voiceover). Her craft set has lots of lovely examples. I found an instructable for the pointed petal, but the pictures are a little small. There are a lot of super-amazing Japanese examples here. The individual pictures are big and beautiful and detailed, but I found them a little slow to load.

These are my very first efforts. Kanzashi are made from folded squares of fabric, and are remarkably easy (though I hesitate to say so, in case some of you find them hard). Looking at the book and my own creations, my favorites are the ones with lots of petals. They're like potato chips: I'll just make one more.


Here's a really large one, 6" squares maybe?, using a flower-shaped yo-yo for the center. It's a pointed petal, possibly with an extra fold.


This one is tiny, from 2" squares.

It's sometimes hard to decide which side should be up. Here I used the pleated petal, and for the rear view I squished it into a spiral.


Remarkably, I found a justification for all this. We are giving wreaths to the many grandparents this year, and I hit on the idea of adding giant red kanzashi in place of bows. This is made from 8" squares, folded in a modified pleated petal. I anchored the folds with a few hidden stitches, then folded up the sides one more time. I did most of them watching The Thomas Crown Affair for the umpteenth time, while taking a break from Thanksgiving pie-making, (It was the Pierce Brosnan remake, but some day I'll have to watch the Steve McQueen original.)

That's an extra-large (60 mm) yo-yo in the center. On the others I used a brass button for the center, which looked even better. (Well, really a brass-colored plastic button, but that is better anyway for outdoor use.)

It ended up very suggestive of a poinsettia.



I ran some wire through safety pins on the back, and wired the whole thing to the wreath. I'm hoping the bow can be removed and reused. And get this, Mr. Tea's mom drove up for Thanksgiving, so she could take her own home with her, and deliver two others on the way!

96 Purples

I like to do tests. I like to find good colors. I like to repeat a good color.

But this time, I got a little carried away.


I wanted to find a good purple, so that means trying different proportions of red to blue. And trying the three different blues, and both reds. And I might as well try super-low immersion and regular low immersion, right? And all that dye left in the cups, what if I try a second round? And the two reds are pretty different, so maybe try a combination of the two?

Well 5 different proportions x 3 blues x 2 reds...that's 30 colors. Dye three versions of each and that's 90. And throw in two more colors using a mixed red and do three versions...96 purples!

Here they are:


I can't say I really found my perfect purple, but I discovered some interesting things.

My biggest surprise was seeing what happens the second time I use the same dye bath. Blues stick around much better than reds, and there is a tan that remains in the Fire Red (which is a mixed color). I really like those tans, and the aquas I got from Fire Red & blue. Neutrals being so hard to get, I might try this on purpose some time. Clearly I need to test a second round of each color alone

I was also surprised that the reds are as beefy as they are. I tilted my proportions to include more red, because I expected the blue to overwhelm it. But take a look at the Fuchsia & Turquoise combo. Even with twice as much blue as red, it's a pretty reddish purple. It's also clear that reds just don't travel like blues and yellow. So in super-low immersion, the blue got good penetration but a lot of red must have stayed in the water. (My super-low immersion is 4"x6" of fabric in a 1-ounce container.)

I expected the Fire Red combos to be muddy, but hoped they might be interestingly subtle. They're just muddy. But the combo of Fire Red & Fuchsia shows promise.


That's even amounts of Fuchsia & Fire Red. The proportion of total red to Turquoise is 2:1 (above) and 1:2 (below). Very low immersion on the left, regular in the center, second run on the right. I rather like that pale aqua lower right, and each of the low immersion samples.

By the way, that stripe of pale blue on the lower left sample was the result of a failed experiment. I label my samples in Sharpie along their top edge. If the fabric is dyed a dark color the label can be hard to read. So my clever idea was to put gel glue resist over the label. But being water soluble (duh) the resist rinses away in all but the very low immersion versions.

Of course I did some plain old playing around with the remaining dye. Here's fabric crammed in a container which I squirted with lots of colors. The result is the one on the left.


For no good reason, during the main dyeing I added dry fabric to the cups and let them stand there a few minutes before submerging them. I think I just liked the look of them all standing up like soldiers.


So the dye started wicking up the fabric, different colors moving at different rates.


It created a little streaking, that you can see here. Might be worth doing deliberately some time.

Woolly Woolly

When my husband's brother & family moved to Seattle, I felt a responsibility to show them the sites, and took my sister-in-law to the Northwest's mecca of fiber, The Weaving Works in Seattle's U District. I haven't darkened their door in many years, but am so happy they are there.

I like to spin, but preparing fiber holds no thrill. I find raw wool rather icky. At the Weaving Works, I love the balls and balls of combed top, all clean and free of sticky lanolin, ready to slip right through my fingers into yarn. (I'm like that with bread too: I don't get off on the whole kneading thing, but I love risen dough.)

On this visit I made a new discovery: super-wash wool is available ready to spin! A washable handspun sweater? Could that be possible? It comes only in white, so I'd have to dye it…am I up for that? Since the last move (a decade ago) and having a kiddo, I haven't been near the spinning wheel. But among the many challenges of parenting is to bring back what got shelved during the diaper years.

At home, I dragged out my trusty old Ashford wheel, happy to find was that it was in pretty good shape. I got a quick tune-up from the wonderfully knowledgeable people at Northwest Handspun Yarns here in Bellingham. Another fine surprise was that my old fiber was in good shape, unmolested by moths and other forces of destruction. I spun my test bit of super-wash, and this and that from the old box. It felt nice to spin again, and to knit the new yarn into a hat.


My Portland sister-in-law makes marvelous sculptures from washed fleece and recycled sweaters and would like more colors, so I'd already been considering dyeing wool for her. After getting all my fiber reactive dyes & supplies, I wasn't wild about investing in a full set of acid dyes (dye for wool). Jacquard sells itty-bitty jars of dye, which are pricey per ounce, or big jars which are just plain pricey. Between craigslist and follow-up emails I found Nina at Rockport Rogue Island Farm (Rockportsheep@copper.net) who would sell me 1-ounce jars of dye, for $4/ounce. Perfect!

I was tired and grumpy the day the dye arrived. Next day was much the same, but maybe some art therapy would help? It did!

Lacking a quantity of the superwash top, I tried out what fiber I had, including some smooth butterscotch-colored top. Could I dye it without felting it into unspinnability?

The short answer is…YES!

My first step was to look for my old friend Hands-on Dyeing by Betsy Blumenthal and Kathy Kreider. It was nowhere to be found! I think I must have used the library's copy 18 years ago. Well thank you Bellingham Public Library, because they still have it. (I did find my copy of Hands-on Spinning by Lee Raven. It's of the same vintage, same series, and also outstanding.)

For my first dye run, I used an assortment of wool: some plain washed wool, some locks, some yarn, and some combed top. I soaked 50g of fiber in 400ml water, 100ml vinegar, and 2T salt. More solution would have been better. I was impatient, and this is only a test, so I didn't really wet it out for long enough.

I set up my old steamer with crumpled paper in the bottom of the steamer insert. That might not be necessary, but the holes in the pot look a little rusty.


I pasted up some Marine Blue, Sky Blue, Black, and Pink (Jacquard's color names), using a very approximate 1/8 teaspoon of dye and 25 ml of warm water. I lay the drained fiber on a rack and squirted dye solution from syringes. I mixed colors a bit, diluted now and then, and generally tried to get assorted shades of blue. On the fluffs of downy wool, the dye went on in litle spots, leaving lots of white. Is that the nature of that wool, or was it not really wet? It was easy to saturate the top.


I was impatient with the steaming too. I had to get Sparky to his art class, so I just turned off the burner after 35 minutes and let it sit while I was gone. Once I got home and rinsed the fiber, I was pleased that so very, very little dye rinsed off. Compared to the fiber-reactive dye, this stuff was stuck on with superglue. [Well not really. See below.]

Waiting for it to dry was so hard! I really wanted to know if the top would remain spinnable. I kept kind of poking and turning it, and trying to tell myself that this wasn't a smart thing to do with wet wool. Before bed I set it near a heater, protected from the cats.



Once dry, the top felt pretty good. I really really really wanted to spin it! Unfortunately, one of Sparky's friends recently got too friendly with the spinning wheel and snapped the rubber connector between the treadle and the footman. I called NW Handspun, who can get the part but don't have it in stock.

I placated myself by knitting up the dyed yarn, but that only whetted my desire. So I examined the situation and did a very funky temporary fix on the wheel. I've got a pin stuck into the dangling rubber and many wraps of thread back and forth between the rubber & pin and the screw on the treadle bar. It worked!


The top spun BEAUTIFULLY. It was just as smooth and fluffy as the un-dyed stuff. One thing I noticed is that the color on the top gets more evened out after that gentle pulling one does to fluff the fiber before spinning. Over all, the spun yarn has more consistent color than I was going for, but now I have a benchmark. The yarn looks like blue jeans: just that hue, and varying from dark to faded.

My goal is yarn which has color variation, but doesn't knit up stripey. Narrow diagonal stripes of color on the top might work. I like 3-ply yarn, which homogenizes the color as well.

(Note to me: a yard of that top is about 9g, from which I got 8 yards of 3-ply, approximately worsted weight.)

And here is the yarn all knit up. On the left, dyed yarn, and on the right yarn spun from dyed top.


And about that dye sticking like superglue...I was fooled. Once that dyed top became a knitted sample, look how it ran!


Maybe the dye didn't run before because there wasn't much agitation? I dunno. In the second and third rinses the water was clear. The sample made from dyed yarn didn't run like this.

P.S. I was delayed in posting this because random words started typing themselves on the screen, such as That will When Dwight and what was The are all that only neo. What is this? Some strange virus? Who is Dwight? We ran the full 3-hour virus scan, and all was well. We then noticed a leetle teeny window on the screen, and realized that somehow speech recognition had gotten switched on!