Paper wefts

 From the Comics to the Unknown

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I wanted color in my newspapers, so the Sundy Comics are providing it. Now, all I have to do is improve my spinning of it.

My first skein had so many knots because whenever my “yarn” broke I just tied the pieces together and went on spinning.

Fewer breaks and knots for my 2nd skein using the comic section. This is how I’d like the yarn to be (no knots). I’m thinking of making a vest if I can get good enough and comic sections from my neighbors.

I decided to take a chance and ply 2 yarns to make a stronger yarn. I like it a lot but it means spinng twice the amount! Maybe I will only have enough for an accent wefts.

Here’s the spinning wheel I’m using, and I like it a lot—a Louet. My teachers like it for their beginning students.

This is my own spinning wheel. It would draw in too hard and I never could get a thread that wouldn’t break. I thought it would be good because it is known to be a good twister. I guess one still has to have something strong enough in the first place. I bought it in the 70’s before I learned to spin because I loved the look and the large orifice.

More Learning: Spinning Pattern Paper and Newspapers and Using a Spinning Wheel

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I’ve learned to spin pattern paper and am working on newspapers now. Using a spinning wheel to do it is a whole new experience for me. This piece uses pattern paper and all the colored newpaper I could manage for the first week.

I had several serious spinners teach me and I discovered my “Indian Spinner” wheel wasn’t going to work. Now I’m borrowing a Louet wheel which is what they use for teaching. I conquered spinning black and white newspapers, but when I saw bits of color in this piece I began to want to spin colored parts of our local newspapers—something else to learn!

I tried basket weave to show more of the paper wefts. The colored paper I still had not conquered.

This is my first newspaper experiment. I was just learning to weave newspaper and when the thread broke I just tied the two pieces together and kept on spinning. The knot ended up right in the middle and I needed every inch of thread, so I just left it there.

I’d made a piece before using strips I cut from a page in an old Japanese book. I had to try this soccer boy! You can see my previous paper spinning on my website HERE.

2024 Japan Trip, Day 11 – Two Artists on Our Way Out of Kyoto

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We visited the studio of Mr. Shinto, a very famous artist and indigo dyer. His technique we call pole wrapping or Arashi Shibori. Cloth is tightly pleated on a pole then put into the dye. The dye doesn’t get to the inner part of the pleats so the dye gets only to the edges of the pleats. I was very surprised to see the openness of the weave and thinness of the cotton fabric.

His set up for wrapping: cloth is bunched together one a beam and wound on to another beam where the cloth is tightly pleated. The second beam is actually a drum.

He uses these tools to push the cloth into tight pleats. Someone asked if he would sell the tools. They are from Amazon!!

Here is one of his poles filled with the tightly pleated cloth ready to be dipped into a deep dye vat. The vats are under ground to keep the perfect temperature.

We drove onward to the studio of Tamiya Roden where they have developed a way of putting mother of pearl onto paper, then cut it into strips to weave as wefts in high end textiles. In the photos see the shell and the gold strips.

These weft strips have the image of petals in the mother of pearl applied. The gold is gold leaf put onto Japanese paper—a traditional technique in Japan. I saw gold on paper wefts being woven the first time I came to Japan 50 years ago.

Here you can see that each paper weft only goes across the cloth just once. In other words a new strip is used for each weft. Fine regular wefts separate the strip wefts.

Again, one weft per strip. However on many cloths it looks like they figured out how to make a single weft go back and forth continuously.