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Dye tests – scouring linen

By | February 3rd, 2016|dyes, fibers, linen, scouring, silk, wool|

This linen will be red. What shades of red, I don’t know yet – a series of tests with madder, cochineal and brazilwood is my current dye project.

Playing with the colours is fun&exciting, but much as I’d like to get right into weighing out the madder and grinding up the cochineals, I first need to scour the fabrics & yarns. Less entertaining, but necessary – before the colour goes in, whatever is inhabiting the fibre has to come out, and there’s a surprising amount of gunk on even the newest, cleanest, whitest textile!

Of the three fibres I scoured – silk, wool, and linen – the most dramatic was the linen. Though the yardage was new and clean and very white, the water turned this dirty yellow from the waxes and pectins from the linen, plus whatever was added in the processing.

In this case, I suspect there were optical brighteners – the fabric started out bright white. Now it’s still white, but with a more “natural” tone.

…

The PH meter I ordered just arrived in the mail! Now to calibrate it…

 

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got a great new knitting widget

By | November 6th, 2015|equipment, knitting|

A friend told me about these a while ago and I finally went out and bought a set. They’re a beautifully simple idea that keeps super-fine knitting needles from getting bent, folded, spindled or mutilated – and keeps the work from falling off the needles.

Just slip the needles & work into the tube

 

knittngWidgetOpenthen push & turn the tubes until the needles & working edge are safely enclosed:

knittngWidgetClosed

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Knitted silk stockings, first attempt

By | December 3rd, 2014|costume, dyes, knitting, silk|

Raspberry-mousse coloured knit silk stockings - first attempt

My first attempt at knitting the Eleonora stockings in silk was an education! (My first-first attempt was in wool, which I’ve had lots of experience with – and the gauge was way too big, so I abandoned it.)

To get back to the silk: I wanted to dye the yarn a true red with cochineal.

Since cochineal is sensitive to ph – an acidic dyebath pushes it toward red and a basic one towards purple – I used neutral ph distilled water for the dyebath and added vinegar in an attempt to shift the colour towards red.

Though I’ve gotten bright reds with cochineal & vinegar on wool, for some reason the yarn refused to become red no matter how much vinegar I added.

It settled to a raspberry mousse shade and refused to budge, so I worked with that.

When I started to knit the cuff, I discovered that it knit up to significantly fewer rows per vertical inch than the swatch I’d made. This squashed the detail so badly that I could hardly see it, which surprised and puzzled me.

I asked a friend who had knitted in the round with silk, and apparently this was due to the fact that, unlike wool, silk has no “memory”. Wool springs back to its original size; silk stays stretched.

To make the pattern look right, I knit each pattern row twice. This made the pattern a little longer, but that was better than squashed.

For the swatch, I just knit on the needle part of a circular needle, back&forth with very little pulling, so it didn’t stretch. Working in the round on the stocking, I was pulling the piece around the whole needle, so it did stretch.

The other disappointment was that the surface of the yarn scuffed, spawning little balls of purple fluff. If this happened during the knitting, the finished stockings would probably get scuffed & covered with purple fluff when worn, obscuring the pattern.

Which would make knitting so much complicated detail kind of pointless.

So my next attempt will either be in wool or a wool/silk blend, depending on budget & availability, and if it comes out on the purple end of the scale when I dye it, I’ll try overdying it with madder to get a true red.

Live&learn!

 

 

 

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Mining the stash part 2

By | November 6th, 2014|costume, cotton, fur, Italy, SCA, silk, the stash, travel|

LiviaDaPortoThiene&Daughter4webTurns out my Mining the stash project is going to be delayed. For the best of reasons: I’m going to Italy with my sister next spring – and the dates are just too close to do both justice.

Much as I enjoy the annual SCA* Arts & Science comptetition, it’s no contest – I’m off to Italy!

A great opportunity to look at lots of art and at any historical textiles I can find.

With luck, I’ll be able to see stuff I’ve never met before and gather lots of information on colour, details and those visual elements that translate poorly at a resolution of 72dpi, or even in book-size photos.

In the meantime, I’ve gone through the stash & chosen the main fabrics for the gown and coat and the fur for the lining and the zibellino (the furpiece the countess is holding over her arm).

fabrics & furs for the Livia di Porto Thiene outfit project

 

  • The coat fabric is a grey/taupe cotton velveteen – apparently cotton velveteen is closer to what Renaissance velvets were than 21st century velvets. I’m hoping to be able to check this out while in Italy!
  • The gown fabric is dark green silk damask – to show the detail, I’ve made the scale bigger in the sketch than it is in real life
  • The fur lining will come from an tawny mink coat a friend found when clearing out his mother’s estate
  • The zibellino is a red fox fur I bought in a second-hand shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

Tempting as it is to get started making the outfit, this is as far as I’m going to go with the project until I come back from Italy!

Actually, that not quite true –  I’ve made the zibellino and am working on a detail that doesn’t show: stockings. As the countess is dressed for winter, she’s almost certainly wearing stockings.

I’ve used my imagination and am making a pair of knit red silk stockings in the style of the pair found in the tomb of Eleanora of Toledo. I dyed the yarn with cochineal and am waiting for it to dry. It looks like it’s going to be more towards purple than the red I was aiming for, so it’s going back in the dyepot tomorrow.

Stay tuned…

* SCA – Society for Creative Anachronism

 

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Adding to the stash

By | October 21st, 2014|cotton, silk, Textile Museum of Canada, the stash|

Regardless of overstuffed storage space, the stash grows.

The Textile Museum of Canada Volunteers’ “For Love of Cloth” sale last weekend tested my resolve – and it crumbled a bit.

A pair of sample panels in this huge, gorgeous stylized carnation pattern that looks like it’s inspired by Ottoman ikats bushwhacked my resolve. They’re gorgeous; no idea what I’m going to do with them. They’re from Pierre Frey in Paris, and I discovered that one of the colourways is still available – one more yard would be enough to make a spectacular vest. However, when I found out that the fabric is $600/yard + tax + shipping, I gave that idea up. Maybe something parti-coloured!

My mission for going to the sale actually was to find a fabric to make the shell of a mink-lined vest. A couple of years ago I found a vintage mink vest with a the label of Simpson’s, a long-gone department store I used to shop at, and I bought it out of nostalgia.

The vest fits but it’s showing its age – bald spots around the arm holes and a couple of divots from moth-munches – so I decided to turn it into a vest lining.

I wanted a shell fabric that was lightweight and interesting, and lucked out with a sample panel of a toile de Jouy-like  cotton/silk damask.

Green and blue sample panel of cotton/silk damask in a toile de Jouy-like pattern

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now all I need to decide is whether I want to use the blue version or the green version…

 

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Mining the stash

By | May 4th, 2014|costume, fur, medieval, museums, SCA, the stash|

I’m mining my fabric stash for next spring’s Ontario Society for Creative Anachronism Arts & Science competition. The plan is to use mostly what I have on hand, only buying new materials when there just isn’t anything in the stash that’s suitable.

A bit of background: the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is an international organization dedicated to researching and recreating pre-17th century arts and skills, and the Arts & Science (A&S) competitions include all of those except the martial arts.

A&S costuming competition gets into some pretty extreme authenticity, using only natural materials like silk, linen and wool. Which can be financially challenging – hence the mining of the stash. Luckily, over the years I’ve run into some irresistible bargains that I figured would come in useful “someday”.

Well, “someday” is here!

I’m basing my entry on this 1552 Veronese portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene which is now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland:

1552 Veronese portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene currently in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
It’s not going to be an exact copy; for one thing, the colours that suit the Countess look dreadful on me, and for another, my local second-hand stores don’t run to sable, which is what the fur draped over her arm is. Or lynx, the lining in her coat.

So the excavation begins!

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The raccoon coat

By | February 5th, 2014|fur, Kensington Market|

Sometime in the 1990s I picked up a slightly-too-small raccoon coat at Goodwill. It spent most of its time in the closet because it didn’t fit well and because it was … fur.

Helena in her racoon coat on a snowy day.But seven years ago I traded that coat in on one that was actually big enough, which I started to wear whenever the weather got really cold.

I was concerned that my fur coat would draw negative reactions – though not concerned enough to not wear it!

Lots of people have commented on the coat. But to my surprise, except for the rather dim co-worker who raked me down for wearing “exotic fur” *, the comments have been 100% positive!

They’re mostly variations on “That looks warm” or “That’s a nice jacket”. (Language drift seems to be in action here – even though the coat is ankle-length people almost always call it a “jacket”. Fascinating!)

So I’ve met minimal hostility to fur out there. Which is a good thing – in really cold weather, fur or sheepskin are the only things I’ve worn that actually kept me warm.

And I strongly suspect that the “wonderful synthetic alternatives” we’re encouraged to wear have a big ecological cost. They are, after all, oil that’s been heavily processed. (But that’s another post!)

In the meantime I’m wearing my raccoon coat and staying warm even when it goes down below -30!

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* I’m writing in Toronto, Canada where raccoons are not exotic. They’re vermin. Very successful vermin.

They’ve adapted beautifully to the urban environment and contribute to it by vandalizing garbage cans, tearing up gardens, defecating on roofs, mating noisily under my bedroom window in the middle of the night and occasionally attacking pets and people.

People tell me their raccoon stories when I’m wearing the coat, and so far they’ve all been horror stories.

For example, a gentleman I talked with this morning as we trudged through the snow told me of how he had to get a series of rabies shots because a raccoon bit him. He was sitting in his garden one afternoon when a raccoon jumped up on the bench beside him. He was talking on the phone and thought it was his cat, so he reached down and patted it.

Chomp!

On the whole, I prefer my raccoons as coats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May I please grope your houppelande?

By | January 28th, 2014|costume, language, medieval, SCA|

Medieval statue of a man wearing a long houppelande…a question I asked a gentleman wearing a houppelande made of luscious-looking fabric at the Pennsic War, a Society for Creative Anachronism event last summer.

It came out more suggestive than I intended, but luckily the gentleman was also a fabric geek so he understood!

However, it once more made me aware that the English language needs a word that accurately describes that cloth-feeling gesture so familiar to every fabriholic – that gentle touch/rub/squeeze that tells so much about a fabric.

While there is something sensual about fabric, both “grope” and “fondle” – with their unfortunate associations with unwanted sexual touching – miss the boat.

In Czech – my first language – there’s a word that does the job nicely. In English it transcribes as “shmatat” and it specifically implies touching. Not groping, not fondling. At worst, pawing – as in “get your paws off that yardage”.

And I’ve often wondered whether there’s a connection between “shmatat” and “shmata”, the Yiddish word for rag – as in “rag trade”, aka the clothing industry. I’d be very surprised if it were a coincidence.

Any etymologists of Yiddish out there who can help with this one?

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The image is a statuette of a Dutch count in a long houppelande from the Dam chimney-piece, Amsterdam, ca. 1475. From ‘A History of Costume in the West’ by Francois Boucher.(photo Giraudon)

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beautiful beetles & a costume collection

By | October 26th, 2013|books, embroidery, insects, museums, stumpwork|

A book on beetle embroidery I picked up yesterday pointed me to a costume collection I’d never heard of before at the Narrya Heritage Museum (hadn’t heard of the museum before, either)!

The book, The Stumpwork, Goldwork and Surface Embroidery Beetle Collection, mentions a Victorian dress from the Narrya collection. The dress is trimmed with net embroidered with beetle wing cases – and manages to be gaudy in spite of being full coverage and made from a somber black silk.

The most interesting thing about it is that the scraps of trim left over from making it came to the museum along with the dress! That’s pretty much unique.

I’d love to hear whether any other collection has a garment and its scraps!

As for the beetle embroidery book, it’s beautiful and it’s set ideas for incorporating beetles in a design for an Elizabethan embroidered jacket or doublet – or maybe a vest – running around in my head.

More on that later, when I’ve finished reading the book & decided what I’m actually going to make…

 

 

 

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