Eclectic Echoes

Bamboo and felting

Felting knits by hand is rewarding but extremely labour intensive. With no access to a washing machine that we can control the cycle of, Tammy and I bound and hand felted an old Lopi wool cardigan. Well, Tammy knit the cardigan years ago, I applied shibori resists to each of the (now separated) arms. I then felted each arm. It took about 3 hours of kneading, rubbing, scalding water and ice water shocks to arrive at the texture close to what we were wanting. The result is wonderful, and has now been sewn into a shoulder bag, but man, that was a lot of work. A friend showed us her felting out of the washing machine, which was a touch tighter, but more importantly did not require 3+ hours of manual labor to achieve.

While out looking at our friends latest knits and projects, I finally was able to collect some fresh bamboo. She has a beautiful grove of, I believe, Yellow Groove Bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata) in her yard. She needed to thin out the grove and clean up where it had escaped it’s originally designed area. Thankfully in this climate it is not a very aggressive runner. I now have a caravan FULL of bamboo. Most of the canes were 30+ feet tall with bases of 1.5–2 inches in diameter. After cutting them in half, we filled the interior (we left room for ourselves of course) and put the rest on top of the caravan. For some odd reason we drew quite a few strange looks as we headed from Stonington through downtown Mystic. 

I have stripped some of the larger cane sections (bottoms) and then shredded all the branches and leaves. I let them soak for about an hour and then set about a half pound of them to boil in a pot of water with a pair of silk scarves bound with shibori resists. I didn’t let the water get over about 180 degrees F and cooked the mess of it for about two and a half hours. When it was done, the exposed white silk was cream colored and shinier than the reserved sections. It also has a slight green iridescence to it that you only catch glimpses of when the viewing angles change. The other scarf was one that had been discharged from black to black and tan. On this one the contrast between the black and tan mellowed and the same shine was added to the areas that were left exposed. Considering that this was a shot in the dark I think it turned out very well.

I know that there is one lady in Bali (?) who is using bamboo to achieve “snowy” whites on white silk. Unfortunately I have not been able to uncover her recipe although did just order an obscure book that I believe was written by her (one of two written by the same lady, but the other one is written in Japanese and while it apparently contains extensive recipe information, it would also be over $100 to get sent to the States). Hopefully this book will give me some more clues to this very promising technique. I love the very subtle nature of the technique and the low contrast of the colors. It is really amazing, especially if I can use it for the extra shine and iridescence as a layering technique on top of other colors.