fiber arting
Mar. 2nd, 2019 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7When I'm not beating my head against the novel, or staring in blank despair at the Internet, or attempting to drag myself through my workday, I've been spending a lot of time thinking and reading and researching about linen production. I feel like I've talked about this on here so indulge me if this is repetitive.
unicornduke grew some flax last year and plans to grow more, and we were talking about it and I remembered that a former coworker of mine's mother went to grad school with my mom; they both studied to be museum curators, and the coworker's mom stayed in that line of work much longer than my mother. She worked at a number of historic sites and one of her pet projects at each of them was to grow flax and process it into linen, because that was a big part of American rural life from before the US was the US up until about the 1910s, when cotton finally took over entirely.
So that coworker, who had long ago moved away, recently moved back, and has stopped by a few times. The most recent time he stopped by, I had him give me his mother's email address.
She wrote back instantly with a list of people I should speak to, and in several cases, gave me the people's email addresses by emailing both of us, so. She also volunteered to set up appointments for me to come and see the equipment at these various places.
So, I thought, well, I might as well persuade my sister to grow some flax on her farm too, and now I've been thinking about linen. I thinkunicornduke's motivation was largely that at all the sheep and wool festivals, nobody's got linen roving at all, which is an excellent motivation. I happen to just love linen.
I got thinking, yesterday, about paper. We make paper out of wood pulp nowadays, but early paper was all made from rags, and linen rags were best. So I Googled it, and found that yes, linen is still used in making paper-- mostly specialty papers, specifically 1) currency, 2) cigarettes, and 3) Bibles. I guess that's how you get thin paper that doesn't fall apart, from that evidence. Nowadays of course they don't take old linen fabric and recycle it: they use "flax waste", left over from seed production mostly.
But the one paper was fascinating because it did acknowledge the struggle with flax: if you harvest it in time for the fibers to be fine, the seeds mostly aren't ripe yet. If you wait until the seeds are ripe, the fibers have become coarse. Most of the paper was dry impenetrable shit about chemical composition, but a ways down there was a table that discussed different seed varieties and they had two entries for the variety Ariadne, acknowledging that you could harvest it early or late for different results. (They were talking about industrial-scale stuff, of course, and one of the options was growing it as winter cover somewhere warm, so it was a shortish season for the flax, I think, and it being better for the fiber was an incidental bonus.)
Anyhow. I have a tentative date to go see the flax processing equipment at Hull House, and will at some point be checking out the equipment at what I thought was the Amherst Museum but they changed the name, which is where this former coworker's mom worked for quite a while and so it's largely equipment she herself made or acquired, and she's given me a contact name but I'll probably get my mom's input too for the program director at the facility affiliated with the program where they both studied, which has been doing a flax-to-fiber program for about fifty years now I think.
Then the weird little side thing I've been looking into is that uh. It's super easy to raise silkworms, and in fact a common thing to do is to get a box of silkworm eggs (they store fine in the fridge for long periods) and then incubate them in an elementary school classroom, and once the silkworms are big enough that they probably won't die (a lot usually die right after hatching) you give each kid a worm in a little habitat that can live on their desk and they can feed it every day and watch it and give it a name and stuff, and they're really easy to keep and have been used in all kinds of science experiments because they're so easy and fast-growing.
I have no idea what they do in classrooms once the caterpillars spin cocoons-- probably don't boil them and reel off the silk right there in front of the kids, they probably let them hatch into moths, but silkworm moths can't fly and don't live long, so I dunno. Anyway.
If six-year-olds can do it, so could I, at least for fun and Art. (And I'd boil the caterpillars because I'm an asshole, but I know 500 chickens who would be delighted to put the caterpillars to good use afterward. I know they're a delicacy in Chinese cuisine but I'm not there yet.)
(Of course I was like, clearly i have to grow mulberry trees so i have organic silkworm food so they're safe to feed to the organic-certified hens, and i researched it, and the native North American mulberries aren't great for silkworms but mostly because the leaves are too fuzzy, the nutrition content is fine, so if you threw the leaves through a blender you'd be fine. ORRRR you can feed silkworms on a North American native mulberry relative, the Osage Orange!!!!, which is a thing I've been dying to grow because they're evolutionary ghosts from days of megafauna (!!!!) and I want one, but. This is a crazy side thing; you can just buy dried mulberry leaves along with silkworm eggs and none of it is necessary. BUT. HOW COOL.)
(BRB just planting Osage Orange hedges around all the hog pastures, don't mind me.) (MAYBE OSAGE ORANGE HEDGES WOULD KEEP GOATS IN.) (I need to Stop. Listen, I'm having a rough late-winter.)
Vegetable Manager did a lot of tie-dyeing in college and has planted weld all around the farm. It would not take a great deal of prodding to get him Super Into natural dyeing. I'm just saying. (I have a lead on some madder roots, I just need to lean on my contact about them. Indigo is not possible in our climate unless/until we get that beautiful glass Victorian-style conservatory that I'm absolutely going to build them someday, but we could grow woad.)
I wanna be a textile artist, you guys. No, of course it wouldn't earn me any money, but I've come to realize that none of the skills or dreams or desires I have are in any way monetizable, so I'm just going to have to live poor. That's fine. Just let me make cool stuff. Maybe I can helpunicornduke make roving for fiber shows and that'll subsidize my stupid textile art habit. LOL.
unicornduke grew some flax last year and plans to grow more, and we were talking about it and I remembered that a former coworker of mine's mother went to grad school with my mom; they both studied to be museum curators, and the coworker's mom stayed in that line of work much longer than my mother. She worked at a number of historic sites and one of her pet projects at each of them was to grow flax and process it into linen, because that was a big part of American rural life from before the US was the US up until about the 1910s, when cotton finally took over entirely.So that coworker, who had long ago moved away, recently moved back, and has stopped by a few times. The most recent time he stopped by, I had him give me his mother's email address.
She wrote back instantly with a list of people I should speak to, and in several cases, gave me the people's email addresses by emailing both of us, so. She also volunteered to set up appointments for me to come and see the equipment at these various places.
So, I thought, well, I might as well persuade my sister to grow some flax on her farm too, and now I've been thinking about linen. I think
unicornduke's motivation was largely that at all the sheep and wool festivals, nobody's got linen roving at all, which is an excellent motivation. I happen to just love linen. I got thinking, yesterday, about paper. We make paper out of wood pulp nowadays, but early paper was all made from rags, and linen rags were best. So I Googled it, and found that yes, linen is still used in making paper-- mostly specialty papers, specifically 1) currency, 2) cigarettes, and 3) Bibles. I guess that's how you get thin paper that doesn't fall apart, from that evidence. Nowadays of course they don't take old linen fabric and recycle it: they use "flax waste", left over from seed production mostly.
But the one paper was fascinating because it did acknowledge the struggle with flax: if you harvest it in time for the fibers to be fine, the seeds mostly aren't ripe yet. If you wait until the seeds are ripe, the fibers have become coarse. Most of the paper was dry impenetrable shit about chemical composition, but a ways down there was a table that discussed different seed varieties and they had two entries for the variety Ariadne, acknowledging that you could harvest it early or late for different results. (They were talking about industrial-scale stuff, of course, and one of the options was growing it as winter cover somewhere warm, so it was a shortish season for the flax, I think, and it being better for the fiber was an incidental bonus.)
Anyhow. I have a tentative date to go see the flax processing equipment at Hull House, and will at some point be checking out the equipment at what I thought was the Amherst Museum but they changed the name, which is where this former coworker's mom worked for quite a while and so it's largely equipment she herself made or acquired, and she's given me a contact name but I'll probably get my mom's input too for the program director at the facility affiliated with the program where they both studied, which has been doing a flax-to-fiber program for about fifty years now I think.
Then the weird little side thing I've been looking into is that uh. It's super easy to raise silkworms, and in fact a common thing to do is to get a box of silkworm eggs (they store fine in the fridge for long periods) and then incubate them in an elementary school classroom, and once the silkworms are big enough that they probably won't die (a lot usually die right after hatching) you give each kid a worm in a little habitat that can live on their desk and they can feed it every day and watch it and give it a name and stuff, and they're really easy to keep and have been used in all kinds of science experiments because they're so easy and fast-growing.
I have no idea what they do in classrooms once the caterpillars spin cocoons-- probably don't boil them and reel off the silk right there in front of the kids, they probably let them hatch into moths, but silkworm moths can't fly and don't live long, so I dunno. Anyway.
If six-year-olds can do it, so could I, at least for fun and Art. (And I'd boil the caterpillars because I'm an asshole, but I know 500 chickens who would be delighted to put the caterpillars to good use afterward. I know they're a delicacy in Chinese cuisine but I'm not there yet.)
(Of course I was like, clearly i have to grow mulberry trees so i have organic silkworm food so they're safe to feed to the organic-certified hens, and i researched it, and the native North American mulberries aren't great for silkworms but mostly because the leaves are too fuzzy, the nutrition content is fine, so if you threw the leaves through a blender you'd be fine. ORRRR you can feed silkworms on a North American native mulberry relative, the Osage Orange!!!!, which is a thing I've been dying to grow because they're evolutionary ghosts from days of megafauna (!!!!) and I want one, but. This is a crazy side thing; you can just buy dried mulberry leaves along with silkworm eggs and none of it is necessary. BUT. HOW COOL.)
(BRB just planting Osage Orange hedges around all the hog pastures, don't mind me.) (MAYBE OSAGE ORANGE HEDGES WOULD KEEP GOATS IN.) (I need to Stop. Listen, I'm having a rough late-winter.)
Vegetable Manager did a lot of tie-dyeing in college and has planted weld all around the farm. It would not take a great deal of prodding to get him Super Into natural dyeing. I'm just saying. (I have a lead on some madder roots, I just need to lean on my contact about them. Indigo is not possible in our climate unless/until we get that beautiful glass Victorian-style conservatory that I'm absolutely going to build them someday, but we could grow woad.)
I wanna be a textile artist, you guys. No, of course it wouldn't earn me any money, but I've come to realize that none of the skills or dreams or desires I have are in any way monetizable, so I'm just going to have to live poor. That's fine. Just let me make cool stuff. Maybe I can help
unicornduke make roving for fiber shows and that'll subsidize my stupid textile art habit. LOL.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 02:57 pm (UTC)Fabric design is fascinating, especially if you're doing it from the ground-up.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-03 08:14 pm (UTC)_A Garden to Dye For_ by Chris McLaughlin
Lots of advice on dying. Big list of plants. Tells you which parts of the plant give you which colors. Will tell you if different pH levels of water give you different end results. Lots of pictures.
I'm a newbie to natural dying. This book is very helpful.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 02:00 am (UTC)there's so many cool different parts of textile stuff and it's all super neat.
silkworms sound SO COOL, what a neat idea!!! Plus there are so many silk blends in roving and yarn. I wonder if it's longer or shorter staple....
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 02:33 pm (UTC)Can you believe, my high school had a weaving class, and I couldn't fit it into my schedule. What an idiot I was, who needed dance class or whatever the fuck I took instead??? Or painting, why did I take a class in painting from the charlatan-asshole teacher in charge of that, who told me not to be an artist because he just didn't think my art was interesting? (I was seventeen, no seventeen-year-old's art is interesting! But the other two girls in the advanced class were painting nudes, so I can see how he thought maybe they were more interesting, now that I think of it. Gross, dude.) (Yeah I should have been in the textile art department but I just don't know what I was thinking. The lady who taught it was super weird but at least she wasn't a creepy asshole.)
If you raise silkworms, you get long staple if you boil the cocoons intact with the caterpillars inside, and short staple if you let the moths hatch (they make a hole in the cocoon, which necessarily breaks the single filament the cocoons are made of; if they don't, then you get the entire filament in one piece, and it's usually like a thousand feet long, I forget but it's a lot). I'd sort of contemplated letting a handful of the moths hatch, but boiling the rest-- just to see if I could get one of the moths to lay another batch of eggs, y'know? I wouldn't let that go too many generations, though, they'd be super inbred and I don't know if that's good. But I figure the hatched-out-of cocoons would be better for using the silk to blend with, and then the single-filament stuff would be best for spinning as-is.
I keep joking that I should harvest the spider silk from the barn but I don't know how you'd clean it. Still, though-- orb weavers galore, man.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 04:27 pm (UTC)there's got to be somewhere to put a loom....
hmmmmmm that's really interesting about the silkworms! if they aren't super expensive, it might not be too bad to buy new ones each year and then you can keep some for shorter staple blending.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 05:15 pm (UTC)I can possibly fit a loom in my as-yet unremodeled upstairs, which we're figuring on putting insulation into at some point. Like, if from the beginning I'm like, there's going to be a loom here, then I can make there be room. ORRRR I mean the upstairs of the granary is a workshop space and if we can bring ourselves to Sawzall out the grain bin dividers from 1820 we could stick a loom in there instead, there's tons of room especially if we set all of Fiona's unclaimed hoarder shit on fire and don't tell her.
And the silkworms-- I mean, if you bought in new eggs to hatch at the same time as some eggs from your saved batch, then if you let a few caterpillars from the separate batch hatch out they could maybe breed. It'd be hard to guarantee, though, since they live such a short time, and like what if you only had a few survive and how could you be sure they were from the two different batches?
On the other hand silkworms *are* super inbred, it's kind of what they do, so maybe just don't worry about it until you have a batch that fails, and then buy in some new ones, or if it turns out to be gourmet shit you can find someone who is a specialty breeder type and just source eggs from there, right? I'm saying "you" but I mean "me", lol.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 07:42 pm (UTC)It would be interesting to figure out what a good production cycle is for silk. How much does one silkworm even make? How are the worms produced even? Very interesting questions. It would be neat if you tried it!
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Date: 2019-03-05 08:41 pm (UTC)I got a feeling this is the slow time for museums. I think Hull House isn't even currently open.
I have the name of a guy at Cooperstown to contact but I haven't even tried looking him up yet-- they sell little bitty souvenir packets of like, 20 seeds in their gift shop so I bet they'd sell a larger packet if I got ahold of them. I just haven't looked them up yet.
Yeah I have no idea any of the details of silkworms, I don't even know if you need specialized equipment. I haven't even decided if this is something I'm going to try to do in Buffalo. (Probably, at least at first. Or am I gonna schlep the box back and forth? I don't know, man.)
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Date: 2019-03-06 01:27 am (UTC)They've got a variety I don't have yet, so I really want to get that one.
I guess it depends on the size of the box. Bigger than a breadbox?
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Date: 2019-03-06 03:04 am (UTC)I think the silkworms would have to be in something bigger than a breadbox, yeah, so...
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Date: 2019-03-04 02:33 am (UTC)(Lots of Osange orange around here; come and get it. How nifty to think that silkworms will eat it - you'd think if they hate American mulberry, an even more distant relative would be equally unwelcome, but who can fathom the mind of a moth-to-be, I guess!)
Personally, when it comes to insects I would like to raise orchid mantises and blue morpho butterflies. Maybe one day!
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Date: 2019-03-04 02:39 pm (UTC)Pokeweed? That grows as a weed on the farm sometimes. Oh it's also poke salad! Yeah I can see how that's a poverty-desperation food. (Also a good song, I recommend the Tony Joe White original over the Elvis cover. Tony Joe White is so delightfully weird.)
It says you make ink from the poisonous berries. That sounds fantastic and also extremely like something my clumsy ass should not do, I would absolutely poison myself and barf to death.
I do not anticipate I would be a very good insect-husbandry-type but silkworms are supposed to be The Very Easiest Insects Ever to steward, so I'd try it.
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Date: 2019-03-05 03:55 am (UTC)My most recent pokeweed crop was 'helpfully' ripped out of the bed by one of my parents who had come over to mow the lawn when I wasn't home. The attempt before that was grown in a pot, but suffered an unexpected curtain attack that snapped the stem.
Maybe next year...
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 03:06 am (UTC)I wish I liked black walnuts, my dad went nuts for them and planted them all around the house and I can go out and collect a five-gallon bucket of them every autumn, and I just never... do anything. I should at least dye with them, it's dumb not to.