Meg’s Entry

What follows is this entry’s text. You also NEED to see the image in this entry.

Entry #1: Spinning & Dyeing

One of my favorite hobbies is handspinning yarn and dyeing it with natural dyes. For thousands of years, all textiles, everything from sails to lace, were made from yarns spun by hand and dyed, if they were dyed at all, with dyestuffs gathered from nature. Now we have machines to spin the yarn and then weave it, and petrochemicals to dye it with. Many of us do not even know how a spindle is used, or what it means to mordant wool. Spinning and dyeing have turned from a necessary part of life to an esoteric hobby. After all, if there is no need to spin, why take the trouble?

There are many answers to this question. Perhaps the simplest is, “Because it’s fun.” But “fun” does not capture the essence of the craft. The essence is transformation – the transformation from fluffy wool into tight-spun yarn, from undyed white into brilliant color. It is taking disorder and creating order and beauty from it. It is creating something that never existed before, and that will never be replicated. In short, it is sheer creativity.

The picture shows yarns I’ve spun and dyed, along with the spindles I spun it on. (No, I did not make the spindles; they are there because they are the tools I used, and as display devices for the yarn on them.) The larger spindle has undyed wool, the smaller one has some dog hair from my friend’s poodle.

Dyes, from left to right:
(All dyes are on wool)

Dark green: Onion skins overdyed with indigo
Yellow: Onion skins
Bluish-greenish-gray: (wound into ball) Onion skins, mordanted* with copper sulfate, overdyed with indigo
Magenta: Cochineal
Gray-blue: Indigo on gray wool, no mordant
About the Dyes

Cochineal

Cochineal is an insect that lives on the pads of prickly pear cactus. It builds webs that look kind of like miniature cotton balls. If you squish one of these webs between your fingers, they will be stained with bright red juice, and if you then wipe your fingers on your clothes, you will have a really hard time getting the stain out. The red juice is the dye from the body of the insect that lives in the web. To use the dye, you have to pick the webs off the cactus pads one by one until you have as many as you need. It takes a lot of bugs to dye a skein of yarn, too, because the amount of dye in each insect is so small. (And yes, I gathered the cochineal for that skein myself. That wasn’t so fun.) But the results are gorgeous – cochineal has to be one of the brightest of natural dyes.

Onion Skins

These are the papery skins of normal onions, the yellow kind. To use them for dye, you collect a bunch of onion skins, simmer them until the water is dark-colored, strain out the skins, and add your mordanted* wool. Then you just wait for the wool to get to be the color you want. It’s a popular natural dye because it’s easy to get, makes a nice color, and uses a comparatively simple process.

Indigo

You have probably heard of indigo; it is the classic blue-jeans dye, although most “indigo” used on blue jeans today is in fact synthetic. There are only a few plants that produce a colorfast blue dye, and indigo is by far the most famous. It’s also a little unusual in that it doesn’t require a mordant; instead of being absorbed by the fibers, indigo just sticks to the surface of the fibers and rubs off eventually. This, incidentally, is what causes blue jeans to fade.

*”Mordanting” is the process of treating the fiber with chemicals so that it will absorb the dye better. This makes the colors brighter and more durable. There are too many mordants, with too many different effects, to describe here, but the one I used for all the examples (except where otherwise noted) is alum (pickling alum, the kind you can get in the grocery store).