Wisteria textile – round 3

 

As I suspected, this lot of wisteria is woodier than the lot I harvested in May last year. Even after cooking it for most of a day, I still wasn’t able to split the fibres consistently, so I left it to soak in the ash/water mixture for most of a week.

It got a bit funky, so I rinsed it out & continued to soak it in clean water. Yesterday I was finally able to start separating the fibres. Not much to say. It’s a long, picky process:

  • pull a length out of the pot
  • untangle it
  • if it’s got bark on it, scrape the bark off (it’s not mandatory to scrape with an expired ROM membership card, but more fun than using a chipped kitchen knife)
  • pick out a fibre end
  • pull
  • if the strip is too wide to spin into usable fibre, split it & pull again
  • rinse
  • repeat

longAndShortIMG_3942The results are four categories of fibre: short, long, “needsAnotherBoilIMG_3945wasteIMG_3946needs another boil”, and waste – plus chunks that are obviously too woody to make fibre of any kind. Once I finish processing this lot, I’ll put the strips that are fibrous, but won’t separate, in to boil with wood ash for a few more hours & see whether they’re usable.

For some reason I had a lot less waste than last year; maybe July fibre is stronger than May fibre, and less brittle than the October harvest. Or, with practice, I’ve gotten better at processing it. Or both.

This lot of wisteria is darker than the previous batches –  I don’t know whether it’s because I harvested it during the middle of growing season, or because I left it in the ash bath longer, or that this summer is much drier than last summer. Once it’s woven, I’m planning to piece-dye it with indigo, and I’m curious about how the darker fibre affects the colour. I’ve got enough from my initial experiment to weave a sample for dyeing, and I’ll be interested to see how the two batches compare when dyed in the same bath!

 

 

 

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By | July 25th, 2016|dyes, fibers, indigo, wisteria|Comments Off on Wisteria textile – round 3

Wisteria textile – round 2

The house-eating wisteria had a very bad day yesterday; my daughter and I attacked it.

Not just to harvest a few vines for making fibre, but to cut it back seriously. It was starting to infiltrate the roof, and, frankly, I’m very tired of its “house with a bad hair day” effect.

Plus the fact that it was so fat and happy that it didn’t bother to bloom this year!

woody wisteria vinesSo we gave it a severe pruning, separated the leaves & stems wisteria leaves & stemsfrom the woody vines, and today I started processing the vines for fiber.

This is my second wisteria project; the first was an experiment to see whether I could make any wisteria textile at all, which I posted on facebook

This time I’m aiming to produce enough wisteria fibre to weave a furoshiki with a hemp warp and a wisteria weft.

The processing is very low-tech – but hard work. It goes like this:

  • pound the stems with a sledge hammer
  • pull the cambium & bark off the heartwood
  • peel and/or slice the bark off the cambium
  • mix the cambium with water & wood ash & put on to boil

Which is as far as I’ve gotten today. The Very Big Pot is on the stove, full of long strips of wisteria and dirty water.Very Big Pot boiling wisteria

I don’t know how long this lot will take to process. The ideal time to harvest the wisteria is May, but tackling it is a two-person job, and between busy-ness and uncooperative weather, we didn’t get to it until yesterday.

With the extra growing time, some of the stringy, fibrous layer is getting woody, and I suspect I’ll have to pick it out and give it and extra-long boil to loosen it up enough to separate the fibres.

With this huge pot on the stove for the next few days, cooking food is going to be interesting!

 

 

 

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By | July 10th, 2016|fibers, wisteria|Comments Off on Wisteria textile – round 2