Yesterday I decided to do my well overdue “Animal Vegetable and Mineral” challenge for Designing Women (see previous blog).
As is won’t to happen, the day went awry. In fact it wrote another chapter in my coming of age as a textile person. As I sorted through my large plastic box looking for nice interesting pieces of silk (animal) and cotton (vegetable) dyed with the aid of some iron (mineral) , I started to feel something strange. Almost granular. The reason? A totally disintegrated , formerly quite large, fine woollen fabric length that had been steamed in a Trudi Pollard workshop and which was so “good” I could never decide to cut into it. It had lots of gorgeous leaves and flowers in it.
So I had to wash all the unaffected cotton fabric from the box and iron it all again…. I rewarded myself by retrieving a parcel of frozen avocado skins (and one frozen pip) from the freezer and re-dyeing some of the blander cotton pieces. I resisted them with folding and clamping with what I call bulldog clips. If this is not what you call them then you’ll see what they look like from the marks on the cloth. Some have the black of the iron but some are rusty because I re-use my clips. I’m quite pleased with them. Not that they’ll replace the beautiful length of wool….
Horace 
I like the results!
What happened to your beautiful length of wool? Was it little critters? It’s something I am often concerned about, hence my studio smells of moth balls…
My “fabric pantry”, on the other hand, does NOT smell of mothballs. A matter of great regret….now! It will soon. I suppose they were moths. The only evidence was small elliptical white egg cases. Now all flushed down the drain or swept up and in the garbage.
The length of wool hung precariously on the kitchen tap while I photographed the grizzly evidence. Then it was scraped up and placed in a sealed plastic bag and carried to the rubbish bin. I felt i should have had a mask on, there were so many fibres! The good thing was they didn’t like the cotton, not even the cotton that had been resisted with flour paste, even tho’ some paste ALWAYS adheres I find.
Lovely avocado dyeing – shame about your wool! Hope you took a photo before the damage happened.
No Linda, I didn’t have a photo! Actually that’s good as I can forget it now. Three of us shared a large pice of wool fabric. So mine was one third of the total. Let’s hope Julie and Liz still have theirs!