Discover age-old techniques and enjoy making your own beautiful, all-natural fabrics!
- How to produce fiber including wool, fleece, cashmere, silk, linen, hemp, nettle, and working with recycled fibers
- Combing and carding including teasing, hand carding, and drum carding, and preparing vegetable fibers for spinning
- Spinning techniques via finger, spindle, drop spindle, wheel, or machine, plus plying, skeining, and washing
- Dyeing via natural dyes you can grow yourself, including dye recipes, and a list of plants that produce dye, from avocado skins to yarrow
- Weaving via cardboard, Brinkley loom, peg loom, tapestry weaving, Soumak weave, woven edges, and more
- Beginner's projects for a cushion cover, alpaca hat, tie-dye rug, and scarf, each made in the most self-sufficient way possible
Learn how to make your own homegrown natural fabrics to spin, dye, and weave, with this comprehensive guide!
Inside this book, expert textile arts instructor Penny Walsh reveals everything you need to know to start making your own high-quality custom fabrics. Learn where different fibers come from, how to grow and harvest your own animal or vegetable fibers, and how to prepare them for spinning.
The principles of spindle and spinning wheel spinning are covered, along with home dyeing using natural dyestuffs you can grow yourself, and hand weaving with or without a loom. Four simple projects—a rug, cushion cover, scarf, and hat—are provided to help you put your newly learned skills to the test.
With the mighty textile industry able to produce cloth more quickly than ever before, and stores selling furnishing and clothing textiles in every town center, why engage in the labor-intensive and time-consuming process of making your own textiles? The answer is a desire for self-sufficiency! Nothing could be more different from modern factory-made cloth than creating your own unique handmade textiles. Although manufactured textiles employ some of the most sophisticated techniques of any modern industry, using huge quantities of energy and creating waste and pollution, the entire fabric production method can be done by hand at home, using almost no energy but your own.
If you want to learn how to be fully self-sufficient in making your own textiles, this book will show you how. Start making your own textiles from scratch, with Self-Sufficiency: Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving!
Penny Walsh is the author of Yarn: How to Understand, Design and Use Yarn. A visiting lecturer in textile arts at several colleges in the U.K., Penny teaches and researches traditional techniques of dyeing and spinning, using ecologically sound ingredients and renewable sources. Part of the design group AO Textiles, she has worked on fabrics and yarns for Jean Muir, Pecler’s of Paris, Laura Biagiotti, The Royal Opera House, and Aveda Eco Fashion.
