Silk from Japan, Wool from Michigan

Two years ago I spent part of my sabbatical in Japan. As a Japan specialist I go there often, but this time I felt I was going to be deprived of weaving for a few months, so I would try to make up for it by feeding my yarn habit and doing some knitting. Several of our Hawaii Handweavers Hui members had taken a fiber trip to Japan so I collected information about some of the places they had visited. One was a dying company in Kyoto that also had a store selling weaving yarn. I was living in Tokyo, but took two short trips down to Kyoto and on both occasions I made my way to this shop, run by a charming lady who is the fifth generation of this family of traditional silk dyers.

The place is not hard to find once you know where you’re going, and it helps that Kyoto is designed on a straight grid, unlike every other city in Japan. The first time I went with a friend from Tokyo. We found the store and there was a sign on the door saying to go to the dying works a few doors down. We found Mrs. Endo there and she gave us a quick tour of the dye works before coming back to open the store. On my second trip a few weeks later I called ahead, and was greeted like an old friend when I arrived with an American friend in tow.

The shop is quite large, and is a weaver’s delight. I was intrigued by some big skeins of very stiff yarn that looked like some sort of linen or ramie, but she insisted it was silk. The first time I bought a couple of skeins that were hand-dyed in a variegated dark blue, probably indigo but I don’t remember if I asked. I think I bought some white at the same time. On my second trip I bought more of the same yarn in two or three other colors. I bought a single small skein of some beautiful space-dyed black and turquoise linen, because that was all she had and I couldn’t resist it. I also bought two large skeins of a rather fine synthetic yarn that had been beautifully dyed in shades of maroon.

There was also a lot of undyed yarn, but since I am not into dying I was not very interested in the plain white stuff. Mrs. Endo pointed out a basket by the door that contained skeins of a very soft three ply silk in a natural pale yellow or cream color. I can’t remember what the price was now, but it was very inexpensive and I ended up buying five skeins of it. It was so soft that I thought I might knit socks with it.

I brought all the yarn back home and added it to my stash. Then last summer in Michigan I signed up for a half-day workshop on yarn painting with Wilton cake decorating dyes, taught by Michele, the woman who runs a lovely yarn shop in Beulah, Michigan called the Yarn Market. As I said, I’m not a dyer, but the idea of being able to dye right in your kitchen with ordinary, non-toxic materials was attractive.

Michele had prepared skeins of superwash sock yarn for us to dye, and we had a grand time dabbing color on it and then setting the color by rolling up the skein in plastic wrap and putting it in the microwave. The people in the class who had weaving experience were blending close color combinations, while the ones who were knitters tended to make blocks of  contrasting colors. I went home with one skein in shades of pink and peach with a bit of blue thrown in, and one skein in greens, yellows and blues.

Sock yarn handpainted in blues and greens.

Each skein was enough to make a pair of socks, but on about size 2 needles. Now I’ve knitted quite a few pairs of socks over the past couple of years using two circular needles and self-patterning yarn, but I balk at anything less than about size 4 needles.  I figured I would use my handpainted skeins for weaving, not knitting. I brought them back to Honolulu and added them to my stash.

I was excited about trying out my new skill of handpainting yarn with Wilton cake decorating colors, and decided I would dye some of that beautiful soft silk yarn I had bought in Kyoto a year earlier. The first job was to turn the skeins into balls and that turned out to be a minor nightmare. The yarn was soft, slippery, and rather loosely plied. It kept twisting up into knots, and then it was so soft and slippery that whole sections would slide off the ball and knot themselves up.  Each skein turned out actually to be two smaller skeins, so I ended up with 10 smallish balls of yarn.

I measured out one of the balls for warp that I intended to paint, and hung the warp chain on a doorknob in my weaving studio. Then I started looking  for the cake decorating colors and discovered they were harder to find in Honolulu than I expected. So I sort of forgot about the dying project.

After I had come back from Christmas in California with my brand-new temples, I decided to make a scarf with the silk yarn as warp, without dying it. Instead, I would use my pink and peach handpainted sock yarn as weft. I planned to make the scarf 12 inches wide, and the yarn worked out to 12 ends per inch for a drapey twill. That was just the right size for my smallest wooden temple.

I started with the warp chain hanging on the doorknob that I had already measured. I didn’t really want to unwind the warp chain so I just sort of half measured it and figured it was my usual four yards long, it had 34 ends. I measured out the rest for a four yard warp, marveling that each skein turned out to have exactly 24 ends, and evened things out with part of a skein. The yarn still had a tendency to curl itself up in knots and I spent a fair amount of time untangling, but I finally got it all measured.

I warp from the front. I threaded it all in an 8 harness straight draw so I could do the scarf in twill, thinking it would show off the contrast between the shiny silk warp and the painted wool weft. It wasn’t until I was three quarters finished beaming the warp that I discovered why the first skein had produced 34 ends: it was only three yards long, and the rest was four! Fortunately I still had plenty of the silk yarn left. There was nothing to do but un-beam it, pull out the section that was a yard short, and replace it with another set that was four yards long.

To tie the warp to the back beam, I first tried to tie knots into bundles and lash it to the back beam’s wooden bar to save more of the precious silk, but it was so slippery that the knots kept coming out. I ended up having to use the more traditional method of wrapping two bundles of yarn around the bar, then crossing and tying them together with bow. I had to do the same at the front of the loom.

Since the 3 yard lengths had already been cut at one end, I had a bunch of 6 yard lengths of unruly yarn. Instead of trying to wind it back into a ball, I wrapped it all around a stick shuttle, which tamed it somewhat. After spreading the warp I used some of the silk from the stick shuttle to start the scarf in tabby and then a 2-2 twill. My 8 harness countermarch loom has four of its treadles tied for a 2-2 twill on all eight harnesses. I decided that would do just fine, and would save me the hassle of crawling under the loom and redoing the tie-up.

My fat skein of handpainted wool made two large balls, and I set to work not really knowing how much I could weave with that amount of wool. I set the temple, and began weaving. For me, this was pretty fine weaving, since I do a lot of things in wool and mohair at six ends per inch.

I got used to resetting the temple every inch or two, and liked the way it kept the width of the piece stable, after an initial drawing in. I was taught to thread twill selvedges 1-3-2-4. That gave them a bit of definition but also meant that with my regular twill sequence I didn’t even have to think about going up or down in the last shed because it came out right every time. (I later discovered that if I reversed the twill lines I did have to worry about that last thread, but by then it was fine.)

The first full bobbin of the handpainted wool wove just about five inches. I wound some more bobbins and realized that at that rate I wasn’t going to have enough weft to make the scarf as long as I wanted. I had all those short lengths of silk, so the easy solution was to work out a way to put some silk stripes in to make up the difference. I wound the rest of the wool onto bobbins, and worked out a sequence so the two halves of the scarf would have roughly matching stripes. I reversed the twill line for the silk stripes, to give them a bit more interest.

The weaving went along well with the temple, but after the Inge Dam workshop I realized I had been beating too hard. I lightened up and hoped the difference would not be too noticeable. However, the difference in the beat meant that the scarf ended up eight inches longer than I had estimated, so I could have done it without the silk stripes. No matter. The handpainted yarn was coming out in a nice mottled pink-peach with some grayish streaks here and there. I liked the effect even if the silk was not showing too much in the twill because the softer weft was covering more of the silk warp. My only other concern was that the fabric might be a little too firm for a scarf, in which case it could just as easily become a table runner.

I was going to have enough warp left to weave something else, but with the first piece running longer than I had estimated, it might not be long enough for another scarf. That raised the question of how much to allow for fringe between the two items. I finally decided to leave about 10 or 11 inches, which would be plenty for a generous fringe on one piece, and then I could hem the ends of the other one. Moreover, I could decide later where to cut and thus which one would get the long fringe.

I decided to use the rest of the silk as the weft for the second piece. I thought it would be boring to do it as straight twill, so instead I did a broken twill to get a herringbone effect. With all eight harnesses tied up for a 2-2 twill on four treadles, the treadling was 1-2-3-4-2-1-4-3. It took a little more concentration to keep that pattern going, but I soon realized that it was an eight pick sequence and I always had to stop at the end of the eight picks to keep my place when I moved the temple.

It’s getting late, so I’ll tell you next time how it turned out.

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