Wild Yarn (eBook)

Layers of Experience

The layers involved in wild-yarn creation as a form of sensory craft might be experienced in the following ways:

OPTIC AESTHETIC The visual texture of yarn – the look, shading, depth, light, shadow. The many shades of naturally coloured wool, the use of botanical plant dyes and inks, and the many ways to use these in harmony or harmonic contrast.

SCENT Wool in all its stages has a depth of scent that often surprises visitors to my exhibitions – not the raw farmyard smell, but the warm, rich comforting scent of wool. Even when washing it in specialist eucalyptus wool soap, the background scent of the essence of wool is beautifully present. Other natural fibres have their own unique scents, and one of my favourites is raw, wild muga silk, when it is warmed. Linen, nettle, jute – all these plant fibres contain scent-memories of the time before they reached my hands.

TOUCH Our hands are involved so thoroughly with the entire crafts process, that we might begin to take these, our earliest tools, for granted. How fibre feels to the touch is incredibly personal, and this can be a very rich point of departure into a new experience of creating wild-yarn.

Under the Web: Considering Tone and Shade

I will be very subtle about the word ‘colour’, as it implies (in the textile world) the idea that something has been additionally coloured or dyed. Dyeing fibre and yarn is a dedicated craft-form and deserves an entire book in its own right. In this book I will include a set of blended yarn skeins that feature locks (wool curls) that have been traditionally dyed with botanicals, to provide a reference in the discussion of yarn development; however, my own process tends to rarely use dyed fibre, unless it is for a specially requested commission, or something for a theatre production or for a historical museum replica. I will explain my reasons for purposely limiting my use of dyed fibre as you read on, but I encourage you to add in dye work if this calls to your creative vision, and keep it in mind for use in combination with the processes I will be sharing with you. The resource list at the end of the book (see Resources: Fibre & Tool Suppliers) has been compiled to support your research for how best to seek out botanical dyes if you wish to explore them further.

HOW I WORK WITH SHADE AND TONE

Natural wool has its own pigment that constitutes a shade or tone. To me, ‘tone’ indicates a depth of naturally occurring pigment that produces a ‘shade’ (a shade of grey, for example). This shade might be blue-ish, or mauve-ish, without actually being the colours blue or purple in a clear, obvious or direct way. Working in what would be perceived as a ‘neutral’ or ‘natural’ spectrum of colours is itself a discipline, as it asks us to really look to recognize the nuances between shades, to see how to get the best out of combined shades, and how to use the artistic eye to balance or contrast these tones to blend up a yarn that works for us and our project. Here we get into the similitude I invoke often: I liken my yarn blending technique to an artist mixing their own paint. The reason for this is that I have complete control over the blend: I can add light by adding in luminous fibres such as wild silk or seaweed silk; I can mute the tone with a matte plant fibre such as sun-bleached linen; I can add deeper, richer shades of wool to bring the blend into a different colour story. If you enjoy experimental artistic processes and discovering surprising and subtle combinations, then this book is for you!

GENTLE TASK

Consider your relationship with colour, shade, tone, pigment, light and dark. Note which emotions certain shades and tones evoke in you. Do you feel comfortable with a natural-neutral range of shades, or do you prefer botanical dyes? Do you prefer the bright, saturated, vivid colours of an additionally pigmented palette? This is an important step in comprehending your creative needs and finding your artistic voice, using shade and texture to tell a story.

Texture: Textile, Language and Touch

I will talk a lot about personal signatures in yarn spinning, and in combination with researching the etymological threads of text-textile-texture, we can see that texture has linguistic roots in describing many forms of artistic expression, from the written and spoken word, the composition and performance of music, and the structure and form of fabric. In my yarn development, texture became the balance to support my exploration of shade and tone. Therefore, my methodology holds ‘texture + tone’ as an equation I use to fulfill my creative vision, and to which I return when I need to remember the founding principles of my practice.

HOW I WORK WITH TEXTURE

Single-origin fibres each have their unique journey and story. For example, some rare-breed sheep flocks I work with have named sheep that are dear pets, and their age and location yield a diverse variety of textures year-on-year, which are very powerful to use in my creative practice, as the very fibres themselves hold a story. Texture, or the implicit quality of the fibre, has its own lexicon: wool may be bulky, lofty, crimped, warm; silk may be smooth, slubbed and scaled; linen, flax and nettle may be firm, dry, cool, crisp.

The textural qualities of each chosen fibre are unique, and how I combine those together has the artistic methodology of an artisan craft; that is, I am creatively attempting to communicate something of my personal vision, my relationship to and with textile, through the medium of my blended and handspun yarn. I’m searching to combine the differing characters of textures that work together, either in balanced contrast or in aesthetic harmony, that begin to form a visual language, and the spin starts to add the signature personal to me – as your spin will be personal to you – and then the story of the textile work I am crafting is on its way to becoming realized in the final project or finished piece of work.

GENTLE TASK

I invite you to consider what your own creative equation might consist of, and keep it in mind as you encounter your yarn work going forwards.

Here, in the space of actively working with texture, my practice becomes more practically considered and tactile: whereas the shade-tone process can be more imaginal and visionary, the texture process requires hands-on experiential and tangible moments to understand the characteristic qualities of the fibres I’m selecting. This is where having time to explore and gather samples of fibres that speak to you as a spinner is really key. Fibre can be gathered from a range of sources to allow a set of sample yarns to be blended and spun. Once texture becomes a focus of yarn development, and fibre research is underway, another significant aspect of craft ethics comes into play: the...