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My work with the Foraged Colour project from initial ideas to final cloth

Foraged Colour is an Arts Council funded project conceived by seam member Linda Row, which began in February 2020. I was one of four textile artists; seam member Gill Hewitt , Eve Kumari and Frances Westerduin, collaborating with Linda Row to create unique, handmade textiles from British wool and dyed with foraged colours.

Exploring my initial ideas for the project led to my decision to create two lengths of fabric, one depicting woods in spring, and the other woods in autumn, from the same warp. Sampling enabled me to try out different British wools and refine my ideas before weaving the final cloth.

Linda Row dyed over 50 colours from foraged materials, and British madder, weld and woad. On the right, the bright green, dyed from weld and woad, really stands out from the more subtle foraged greens, dyed from ivy berries, alder leaves, majoram and iron, and apple bark and iron.

The Final Cloth

The colour-graduated autumn cloth would highlight the subtle differences in colour that can be achieved when dyeing your own yarn, and the range of foraged colours available in Wiltshire and Somerset. We had yarn left over from sampling, a limited amount of undyed yarn and a strict budget. Whilst I wove the final samples, Linda was busy dyeing yarns for the final cloth. This all took place during the first lockdown

We worked together by sending yarns and windings back and forth through the post. Linda working on replicating some of the sample colours and filling in the colour gaps; with me using windings to check there was a smooth colour graduation, and crunching the numbwers to work out the quantities of each colour that I needed. The creams and yellows were dyed with ivy berry, hydrangea flowers, honey fungus, coreopsis and weld; the oranges and corals from madder.

Working out the numbers was nerve wracking. The wool yarn count – Nm (normal metric), the figure that tells you how many 1000m of yarn there are per kilogram is an average figure. I allowed a 10% error margin but in hindsight it should have been 20%, as I only just had enough dyed yarn for the final warp!

I needed to weave two drops of the colour-graduated cloth. Now I was concerned about not having enough of one of the colours, resulting in the two pieces of cloth not matching when stitched together on the dress – potential disaster! So, before I started weaving, I wound all of the colours for the weft graduation onto paper quills, and then split the quills into two piles; a set for each drop. It worked perfectly (with a lot of measuring) when I wove the two pieces of cloth.

Only a single drop was needed for the spring green cloth. I tied three sets of brown yarn into the warp, to bring in the tree trunks idea, one for each of the three insets in the dress. To contrast with the uniformity of the colour graduation I wanted to suggest the randomness of the leaves and dappled light in early spring. Unfortunately, I only had one smallish skein of a fresh bright green. Once again, I wound the bright green onto quills, and portioned it out for the whole length of cloth.

I started  weaving the cloth intuitively, but found that for a production length (I am not a production weaver) it was very mentally tiring, it took a long time to keep making choices, and there were deadlines. To speed up, I wrote down the last 20cm of my pattern and repeated that for the rest of the length- – this worked, it was a long enough repeat so that there was no obviuos pattern.

After finishing the lengths, Linda whisked them away  to cut and make a wonderful dress. I also created a panel of windings that showcased the different colours of yarn used by the five artists on the Foraged Colour project.

Penny Wheeler

My work with the Foraged Colour project from initial ideas to final cloth

Foraged Colour is an Arts Council funded project conceived by seam member Linda Row, which began in February 2020. I was one of four textile artists; seam member Gill Hewitt , Eve Kumari and Frances Westerduin, collaborating with Linda to create unique, handmade textiles from British wool and dyed with foraged colours.

In my first post I described my intial ideas and my decision to create two lengths of fabric, one depicting woods in spring, and the other woods in autumn, all from the same warp.

Sampling

As well as exploring whether my ideas would work in practice, sampling was about experimenting with British wool. Each weaver on the project had different British wool yarns to try that were new to them.

Left, my first sample warp on the loom looking more like drifting snow! Right I only managed one sample (shown here in loom-state and fluff) with this warp, experimenting with 1:3 and 3:1 twill (top) and broken twill (bottom) blocks.

I had problems with my first sample warp, a worsted yarn, on my eight shaft countermarch loom. The warp quickly became an unmanageable fluff-ball! I tried using spray starch, but it wasn’t enough – perhaps sizing the warp would have helped? A quick search for a new warp yarn was successful, it was thicker, but thankfully, it wove well.

Based on the colours in my photos of autumn and spring trees, Linda dyed a selection of British yarns for the weft, using her store of foraged dyestuffs, and some British-grown madder, indigo and weld. I wanted to suggest the dappled light of a forest, so I experimented with contrasting 3:1, 1:3 twill and broken twill blocks. Linda loved the colour graduation for the main autumn colour way, with the contrast of a broken twill in spring greens. The path idea was jettisoned – too complicated.

The same sample showing how colours dyed with madder can change after washing. On the left loom-state cloth and on the right finished (washed and pinned out). Notice how the lovely bright orange has become a coral.

I was stunned at the range of colours Linda got from madder, from orange to corals, just by adjusting the acid or alkalinity of the dye bath. However, the downside was when finishing my first samples I didn’t realise that I should use a pH neutral soap. All the madder colours became a little bit bluer and my gorgeous oranges changed to coral.

However, I still wasn’t happy. I wanted more contrast between the 3:1 and 1:3 twills – so I widened the warp ends per inch from 21 to 24, to make the cloth more weft facing. I also had to reverse the contrasting 3:1 and 1:3 twills to stop the warp thread movements, the bulges, where the two twills met.

The end of the sample warp. Left: experiments with stripes of different textured and hand-spun British wools, and at the top stripes of waste warp still containing the knots used to tie it on, at the very beginning of the warp. Right: experimenting with extra weft as a path, inspired by Annie Albers.

The end of the sample warp was pure experimentation; making more textural pieces and investigating how I could use waste warp yarn.

The last step was weaving the final cloth with a strict yarn budget that was only just enough! Find out how it went in my final blog post.

Penny Wheeler

My work with the Foraged Colour project from initial ideas to final cloth
“I was one of the four textile artists collaborating with Linda Row on the Foraged Colour project. My role was to conceive and hand-weave cloth from British wool that had been dyed with foraged colours. Linda designed and constructed a dress from the cloth that I wove, and dyed all the wool for my cloth.”

Initial ideas
I love the research phase of a project, especially when working with other people; the energy increases, we bounce ideas off one another, connections are found and our ideas move forward.

I was inspired by the definition of forage that Linda put on the front page of foragedcolour.org

Search for provisions
To wander in search of forage or food
To make a search

Discussing ideas with Linda Row’s sketches and range of colours from foraged dyestuff at our initial meeting.

Wandering has a timelessness; making me think of the folk/fairy tales set in a forest; Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood.

My sketchbook with my initial ideas and some of my inspiration; clockwise from top left Shaun Tan illustration from Grimus Märchen; Anni Albers Dotted 1959, detail; Lorenzo Mattoti illustration from Hansel & Gretel; ibid; Anni Albers Dotted 1959; Anni Albers Under Way 1963; photo by author.

Sketches for cloth to be made into a dress for Foraged Colour

My initial ideas were to create a wandering path through a forest; referencing Annie Albers Under Way, 1963, using recycled silk fabric dyed red. A forest depicted with tree trunk verticals and leafy green horizontals, but then I saw Linda’s fashion sketch. The colours were beautiful; reminding me of autumns past, and the contrasts between autumn and spring.

Clockwise from top left: Linda Row’s fashion sketches for Foraged Colour, which inspired me to look through my photographs from autumns and springs past, images from Bath, Tucking Mill and Stourhead.

My direction was set, two lengths of fabric, one depicting woods in spring and the other woods in autumn, from the same warp.
How could I give an idea of trees? I experimented with ikat to create blocks of colour in the warp with Linda, stripes in browns and purples; using the colours to suggest trunks, some closer and some further away. The next step was sampling, which involved some failures and changes to my ideas… read how it went in my next blog post.

Penny Wheeler