A View from Sierra County

A New Adventure Begins

I have mentioned and hinted a few times at the grand new adventure I have been embarking upon this spring, and today is the day to announce widely, and with the help of a contest, just what I have been up to!

My love of all things fibery has been one of my partners through several decades, beginning when I was five and learned to knit.  In my early 20s, while taking spinning lessons and learning to weave Navajo-style, my teacher also introduced our class to natural plant dyes.  I already knew I had a passion for plants, and had been studying herbology for a few years, so it was a natural step, and I have made many 'experiments' over the years.  I did not instantly become a dyer or start a dye business... in fact, you will see it has taken a few decades of 'cooking' to come to the point of sharing this knowledge and love with others. 

This winter, while pondering what to do in the current (read: dismal) economy,  I realized I had a large parcel on our property that I could use to cultivate dye plants.  From that tiny seed thought, I have spent the winter planning to launch the first Natural Dye Plant CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) venture that I have been able to find advertised anywhere.  One impetus to act now was the localizing that has been taking place in my life for the past five years or so... I realized that while it has become much easier to obtain locally-grown food to eat in my region, clothes are another matter entirely.  I could take one of my loves, gardening, and pair it with a need, for artists to have local color available to help re-clothe our region in locally produced garments!

Today is the Launch Day, meaning that if you go over and visit my new website, Nature's Cauldron, you can become one of my CSA subscriber/supporters by signing up for a share.  My "community" of fiber fanatics is much bigger than just the boundaries of my county or state, so I am going to be drying and mailing out dye plants, as well as a few other goodies, over the course of the harvest season.  You might decide that you and your knitting group want to purchase a share together, so that you can begin to explore natural color options for your future projects.  As my gardens become more productive over the next few years, I will also begin dyeing and offering yarns in the prettiest of natural shades, as well as offering occasional natural dye workshops.  Those of you who have followed my blogging for the past six and a half years will be watching my small farm grow from infancy.  Though most of the farm posts will now move over to the new website, Sustainable Sunday will continue on this blog, sharing my general knowledge about living sustainably with all of you.

I will be growing a wide variety of plants, including Japanese indigo, madder, comfrey (olive green), yarrow (clear yellow), rhubarb (a mordant and pale orange dye), dahlias and hollyhocks, and gathering others from the hills and woods around me, including oak galls, lichens, and toyon.  I live in a rich environment and plan to grow, pick and dry plants all summer in order to prepare four shipments to send to subscribers in the coming fall and winter.  I also plan to include ideas and inspiration on what to make with these plant-dyed yarns.

Not all of my dear fiber friends will want to participate, or to take up natural plant dyeing.  However, all of you have fiber friends as well, and just by tapping into that network of fiber artists, I know that I will be able to gather enough support for this first season of growing and harvesting.  In order to spread the word quickly, I am also launching a contest today to build subscribers to my Natures Cauldron Facebook page, and to get the word out about my adventure.  Each new "like" will be entered into the contest, as well as each individual who comments either here or at the new website.  Of course, if you can get more entries in the contest, you have a better chance at winning the great prize package described below!  So, if you refer someone else, have them tell me you sent them to visit me, and you will get additional entries.

The prize package includes a copy of Harvesting Color, the new book on natural dyeing by Rebecca Burgess of the Fibershed Project (this book will be included in the first of the four CSA shipments!), two ounces of undyed Blue-faced Leicester roving from A Verb for Keeping Warm (local Northern California sheep!), and some naturally-dyed yarns (watch for photos to come).

The contest will run for two weeks, until May 17th, at midnight PDT, so help me spread the word!

Sustainable Sunday: But What Will We Wear?

DH and I got to have a day together, just doing fun things on Friday, and headed to Oroville for the California State Old-Time Fiddle Championships.  We arrived just as things were getting set up, and were informed that the contestants wouldn't begin playing until the mid-afternoon, so we trundled about doing a few errands and checking on the local thrift stores.  As we left one with some great finds, DH said "We should get all our clothes from thrift stores", to which I replied "Well, it seems like that has been pretty much what we've done the past few years".  Truth be told, I managed to escape from poverty between the two major recessions and buy some of my clothing new at retail outlets, but for most of my adult life, living that part of the "American dream" has been beyond my means; when I first discovered thrift stores in my teens, I could buy something for less than the cost of the fabric I would need to sew it, and developed an individual style around that fact.

Clothing is often on my mind, in part because I love fashion and costume, and in part because I am usually always working on one piece of clothing or another, mainly as a knitter.  Which makes my earlier statement a bit inaccurate... I do make a portion of my own clothing annually.

Another reason why I am pondering the concept of how we are clothed is that I have been following the progress of the Fibershed Project, as the year winds to a close.  Rebecca Burgess put together a team of fiber artists (and fiber geeks like me) to help her wear only clothing sourced within 150 miles from her Marin County home for one entire year, including the plants used to color her clothing.  There were two primary reasons she embarked upon such a journey, first, that the textile industry is the number one polluter of fresh water on the planet, both for growing and processing, and second, that the carbon footprint (amount of carbon spent to get something fully produced and into our hands) for our clothing, much of which comes from China these days, is just huge.  She states that the carbon emitted for the production of a t-shirt is up to 40 times the weight of the shirt itself!

I decided to take a harder look at what we need to wear in our daily lives... much of the work clothing DH needs is either provided by his job (seasonal USFS ranger; uniform shirts and pants provided by the agency), however he routinely needs to purchase shoes, t-shirts and undergarments.  He has a large collection of Pendleton shirts for fancier occasions, some of which were gifts and some sourced used by his loving wife.  He has invested in element-proofing outerwear appropriate to our mountain life, and doesn't need to replace those items frequently. He is far less style-conscious than I am so only occasionally needs a 'special' outfit purchased new.  He would really love it if I knitted more socks for him!  He has been very successful in recycling other peoples' clothing, and the carbon footprint of doing so is probably relatively low, as we include such searches into trips for other, more pressing purposes.

In my case, I tend to wear jeans and tops, and have made enough shawls and scarves to last a long while.  I realized when I also surveyed my fiber stash as a part of this general 'accounting' that I have enough yarn stashed for at least a dozen more lace projects, have a shawl for myself on the needles, and committed to a Mystery Shawl KAL next month... and really for my amusement rather than to clothe myself!  I have given away several of the lace pieces I have knitted in the past several years, and have a half-dozen or more to rotate already.  Maybe I will take a break once the KAL is done!  I also have enough hats and mitts for my basic needs, and better finish those crocheted mittens, or knit up a pair, since we continue to get snow!

What I really need - probably nothing immediately!  I do replace socks and underwear somewhat frequently, and could use a nice skirt that would serve me year-round.  Maybe a camisole or two, so that I have summer tops that serve under winter garments.  I will probably be able to outfit myself for the coming summer season fairly well through keeping someone else's discards going another year.

I started thinking about re-tooling my knitting.  What if I tried to make what I needed more than what I wanted?  Some of my regular readers know that I took an interest in knitted millinery, signing up for an online class that I am halfway through.  I will have made myself three hats by the end of spring: one to match my wedding officiant outfit, one for casual shade with summer clothing, and one to use as a garden hat.  This seems excessive, especially considering how many people in the world might be lucky to have even one shade hat!  However all three are for distinctly separate purposes, and I have worn out the summer hats I had.  Looking at the materials I picked, only one of the hats will be crafted from local materials... using a cone of Sally Fox's color-grown cotton.  Although developed less than 100 miles from me, I think most of her product is grown and milled in Texas.  Another uses 2nd Time Cotton, which I purchased a few years back while working at my LYS.  Though milled from recycled (pre-used, leftover waste from t-shirt production) materials, I am sure that yarn wasn't milled within 150 miles from here!  The third yarn is a bamboo/cotton blend from Southwest Trading Company, and while bamboo is a lovely renewable resource, I am aware that cotton is one of the most pesticide-heavy crops grown!  If you are following my logic here, you will see that even if I make something myself, there's a good chance that my desires are only adding to the burden placed on the planet when we clothe ourselves.

I did some research prior to writing this post, looking into what alternatives I had, should I consider making some of the clothing I will need in the coming year.  I already have yarn stashed that will allow me to enhance my sock drawer, so there's no need at present to purchase anything, but I was happy to see that Yolo Wool Mill, located about 100 miles away, could either mill up yarn for me with wool I got from a local sheep flock, or sell me with some for socks.  I could then dye it using my own plants or those I wildcrafted.  Of course, some of you could spin your own, however, I am really only an intermediate-level spinner, so will probably turn to the mill and support their continued presence in our region.

According to the research Rebecca Burgess did for the Fibershed year, there no longer is a cotton mill in my region.  I could still locate US-milled cotton, grown organically and without chemical dyes, in order to make a summer camisole or two, however if I want true 'bras' or underwire-able camisoles, such as the patterns in Knitting Lingerie Style, I would want a cotton/elastic yarn such as Elann's Esprit.  Elann states on their website that this yarn comes from Brazil, and judging from the colors shown, it is not available undyed. 

You might be shaking your head and wondering why I would even consider making undies!  After all, you can now find organic cotton items to purchase at places like this. The problem is that product diversity in the organic market just is not the same, especially with prices being higher, than what it is at your local Walmart, or a specialty lingerie store.  If I want a lower-impact item, I might just have to make it myself.  If I want an item that is also 'regional', I will have to start raising my voice in support of a re-localizing of production!  I got pretty worn out searching the 'net the other night, and really only found a handful of organic yarns that were produced in my own country, let alone my own state.  There's a lot of work to be done here! 

I did discover EcoButterfly, a wonderful purveyor of organic, fair-trade cotton yarns for those summer items worn close to my skin.  For those thinking of sewing up some t-shirts or other clothing, they also carry a line of fabrics from Pachuko in Peru.  Seamstresses might also want to check out Hemp Traders, a large online seller of several kinds of organic fabrics; the offerings I looked at didn't list country/state of origin, though I did fall in love with this beautiful fabric for a skirt.  Once again... lots of carbon used to get these products into our hands, though less impact in their growth and processing.  You probably have noticed that I haven't even considered footwear!  That will have to be the subject of a whole lot more research and a future post.

All of this searching led me back to the place I started from... that conversation with DH after leaving a thrift store.  The clothing we purchased was not originally made to my standards regarding avoiding sweat shops, sourcing regionally, wearing organic materials, etc.  However, those items were being kept out of the waste stream, given more life for the resources that had already been expended in their creation, and still had plenty of wear left in them.  Their purchase did not make much of a dent in our budget, nor did it require the large expenditure of time that knitting one sweater would involve.  Was it better to simply keep on wearing second-hand clothing, with maybe the exception of intimates and shoes?

What I have learned at this point is that 'local' clothing is much more difficult to come by than local food.  Those of us in the fiber arts have been busy creating, but also need to step back and look at the sources of our supplies and what impacts those sources create.  Are we supporting producers who are ethical?  Are we getting our own clothing needs met in ways that match our conscience? Perhaps the best alternative for that skirt would be to simply keep on searching until I locate a choice piece of second-hand material to sew up one!

I am hoping that my readers will weigh in on how they feel about this subject, which is really close to my heart as I embark upon my dye garden expansion to a 'commercial' level this season.  Talk to me in the comments!

Find of the Week

I have been trying to squeeze in visits to the local thrift stores in order to gather materials for my repurposed fashions the past few weeks... of course there is always the unexpected treasure that turns up amongst the pure rubbish, making the search all that more intriguing.  This has to be the find of the year, really, not just the week....
This piece is knitted of the finest thread, probably cotton, as it has held up very well even though it could easily be fifty or sixty years old... the center is threaded onto a piece of string, ready to be sewn to a round of muslin or linen for a finished doily.  I was amazed to stumble upon this, and it was very inexpensive because of its unfinished state.  My hands gave a few twinges just thinking about the tiny wires posing as knitting needles that must have been required to knit this work of art.

I could attach it to fabric, but it would lose its historic integrity... I will probably just figure out how to frame it in a shadow box one day, and preserve some hard-working knitter's labor of love for the future.  When I found this lacework while pawing through a bin of hankies, it was as if a knitter from the past, without the benefit of the blog-Ravely-Yahoo list community we are blest with these days, reached out and touched me; I had to take her work home with me.

Tie Dye Tales

I had mentioned last week that my Headstart center does an annual tie-dye marathon at the end of each school year in order to present each child with a shirt and other gifts at the closing preschool celebration.  I had thought of tie-dye as something that developed in the 1960s and faded in the 1970s, but many of my young parents are passing along to the 3rd or 4th generation of tie-dye wearers a much-advanced and improved-upon dye process and product.

First, there is the fact that many of the dyes have improved significantly in the intervening thirty years.  While Sara is the dye expert I turn to for fibery advice, I discovered that our Family Advocate, Stormy, was an old hand at the skills needed to dye cotton textiles with sufficient depth of color.  First, she made sure that we ordered lots of all-cotton items sewn with cotton thread from Dharma Trading Company, so that the colors would dye evenly.

On the appointed day, she set up plastic buckets to pre-soak the items in a soda ash solution.  This allows for better dye penetration.  Prior to pre-soaking, we got busy creating dye-resist areas, either by wrapping and binding with various sizes of rubber bands, or painting on a resist solution that is more fluid than the traditional beeswax used in Javanese batik, but a bit less "blocking".  One mother painted glorious animal designs with the resist fluid for her children.  The resist liquid, available from Dharma, works best on clean, dry textiles and needs to dry again before dye is applied, but all of our other items were soaked for twenty minutes and dye was applied wet.  While staff and parents dyed items for the youngest children (and I dyed 12 hankies to use for napkins), the preschoolers got to each take a turn with assistance and paint their own.

This photo captured one of the little hands at work, applying pre-mixed color with a fine-tipped squeeze bottle.  The dyes are Dharma's generic version of Procion-type, cold water dyes, which also work very well on yarns.

We had five colors to choose from - yellow, green, purple, red, and marine blue, though some adults did a little mixing to extend the shades.  Since my co-caregiver and I wear hospital-style smocks while providing direct infant care twelve hours a week, we dyed some white cotton smocks we had ordered with diluted colors to achieve a harmonious, pastel effect (well, at least we tried... they turned out paler and softer than anything else!).

This photo shows two works in progress.

After the item was sufficiently colored, each was double-wrapped in plastic wrap and set aside to "work" for 48 hours.  The plastic wrap contained each masterpiece to avoid cross-contamination and a lot of browns... as well as to keep dye from oozing out.

This is one of about four buckets of completed items created over several days; I spent a full day with one group and another afternoon several of our staff worked for hours to dye 36 small lightweight canvas backpacks so that each child would receive one at our party last Thursday.  I also wrapped and dyed a cut-velvet silk/rayon scarf for myself, and a batch of unidentified yarn I had in the stash for many years... it appears from the results that the yarn was a mohair wrapped around a synthetic core.  I took the yarn home to steam in my yarn canner.

As you can see, even wearing plastic gloves didn't completely save our hands; we were working outside in one of our playgrounds and I ended up with feet that looked worse, as I inadvertantly would step into a puddle left behind...

The rinsing process is long and tedious; each item must be rinsed to flush the dye out, which two staff members did outside using the garden hose, then batches were thrown into the washer with Synthropol, from Dharma, which arrests the dye process and "sets" the fabric to prevent further bleeding.  I used a strong vinegar solution at home on the silk/rayon scarf and the yarn.

The results were pretty spectacular... many items had a crisp deliniation of color, while these backpacks, which we had banded into stripes and painted as rainbows, were more subtle owing to the coarser weave of the cotton canvas fabric.  The kids were delighted to receive their bags full of sunscreen and water toys.

My napkins were far more distinct and "traditional", if such a word can be applied to tie dye.  Each one came out different, with a variety of color combos, some more clear to color and others more blended in tones.  My oldest toddler girl was so delighted with these that she made herself and I headscarves to tie on and wear around the first morning they were finished.

I now have a dozen napkins to use together with the various ones I had brought from home and collected at thrift shops in the past few months; no paper for us!

We were all especially pleased with how the childrens' shirts came out - bright and colorful and something that the preschoolers were proud to hold up and say "I did it myself".

The school year ended last Friday for the 3-5 year olds and now summer will unfold more slowly for the few staff and children remaining on our infant-toddler side.  I will be happy to wait until next year to tie dye again but was pretty excited by the way my yarn turned out.

Lots of my favorite shades of spring green!  As you can see, there is a lighter core, which I suspect is some kind of nylon blend, that didn't take up the color, but it adds to the character... though not much softened up this fairly harsh yarn.  I will try making some winter hats for kids with it next fall.

Here is a close-up detail of my scarf... I was trying for a more gradual blend from yellow through coral to red, however the thin silk blend fabric took up the dye much more rapidly than I expected.  Oh well... the colors are beautiful and so is the velvet leaf design.

This weekend it was back to normal knitting for me, though, with progress on my Lutea Lace Shoulder Shell (only a few more inches to dividing for the armholes), working on the quickie summer scarf I mentioned in the last post AND starting on a surprise anniversary gift for DH.  I also managed to master the mattress stitch while piecing together a sample for the yarn shop (I had never bothered with it before, considering it too fussy, but it does make an elegant invisible seam).  Meanwhile, the burros began kicking up dust as things dry out around here, and the potato and tomato plants seemed to gain several inches each day, while the fish in the pond got an umbrella to shade them from the hot sun.  I promise there will be more pictures as summer begins to appear here in the Sierras.

Meet Kitty Pippin

This lovely and animated woman is the famous Kitty Pippin, who I had the good fortune to hear speak on Friday evening.  Kitty was the special guest teacher at our quilt retreat, teaching two separate one-day classes on Friday and Saturday.  I have done some work from her book, Quilting With Japanese Fabrics and was so delighted to meet her in person.  My dear friend in our Mountain Star Quilters guild, Linda, who did most of the organizational work to pull the retreat together, invited me to join her, Kitty and a few other guests for dinner Saturday, and she greatly admired Susan's Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawlette, which I was wearing, asking for the pattern and delighting in my stories about teaching children to knit.

Kitty had the great fortune to live in China through her childhood and high school, as her parents were missionaries.  Her love of the Orient led her back, and also helped her locate a special shop in Berkeley, where she worked for many years as a drafter at the University of California, and began to collect Japanese textiles.  When she retired, Kitty moved to Lake Almanor, and took up quilting, experimenting with her collection.

At her lecture Friday night, she proceeded to astonish all of us with her immense knowledge about Japanese textiles, their varieties and how they are made.  This first photo shows Kitty holding an unfinished piece of shibori, given to her to demonstrate how the puckers are made, bound and wrapped, in order to create dye resist designs.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember which knitting magazine featured a young Japanese designer who has been incoporating shibori techniques into her work last winter, but I was one of the few people in attendance who had even heard of the term.  Tiny stitches draw up and bind row upon row of "bubbles" of fabric, which then do not "take" the dye and when the original bindings are removed after dyeing, a specific kind of "tie-dye" design emerges, often incorporating traditional Japanese motifs such as cranes or flowers.  Kitty's vest fronts are made from silk shibori pieces.

Her talk incorporated other styles of fabric, including indigo-dyed pieces, those with designs woven directly in, unusual silks rescued from kimonos and more.  The primary designs in the large squares of this quilt are family crests from Japan, and the patterned borders are woven designs.  Kitty's work has more and more included separating lengths of fabric, and combining design elements, such as those "outside of the box" flowers that overlap other design elements.

She has also taken the traditional kimono silks and put together modern designs, such as this vibrant piece.  The silk diamonds are all appliqued using English paper piecing to ensure such precise lines.

Although she had many quilts with her to illustrate her talk, Kitty told us that this was her favorite, incorporating so many of the treasured elements of Japanese textiles she is so familiar with, as well as utilizing sashiko, a unique Japanese embroidery technique, to outline sections, such as the flowing stream at the lower right.

I was working both days of the retreat, but able to return Saturday afternoon to visit with her and check the progress of her class.  While they stitched on their projects, she gave me a quick private lesson in sashiko, telling me what to look for in the proper thread, needle and transfer paper, as well as showing a few tips while making a practice stitch piece.  What a wonderful, generous woman, who travels many weeks of the year to share this knowledge and help preserve the ancient techniques.