Table of contents for Spring 2024 in Spin-Off

Based on an excerpt from Keepers of the Sheep: Knitting in Morocco’s High Atlas and Beyond “Welcome to Timloukine!” Nora said brightly as we reached the top of a steep river bank. We were standing on the edge of a small terraced field full of bright green alfalfa below a village of rammed-earth homes made from the valley’s rust red soil. Surrounding us were the tall, snow-capped peaks of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. The bucolic view was punctuated by the sound of bahing from small flocks of sheep grazing on the slopes both near and far. We followed a dirt mule track into the village. The raoud was a one-room school building in the middle of Timloukine. It had a door, badly damaged chalkboard, and teacher’s desk on one end.…

My usual approach to carding—wherein I throw whatever catches my fancy through my drumcarder—has led me to create some really beautiful yarn and quite a few lumpy or dense skeins that will never see the light of day. After one particularly difficult batt, I decided to dedicate myself to sampling first and developing a plan for my blends. Common fiber add-ins that we blend with base fibers to create color and texture—such as silk noil, sari silk, Angelina, and wool nepps—all behave differently on the drumcarder and in our handspun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve incorporated these into my spinning, and yet I had no idea how much I typically used. Would different ratios have varying effects on drape and color effect, or would the impact diminish…

I grow cotton and flax to make clothes for myself, but when I first grew cotton to spin, I had no idea that I would end up with a homegrown wardrobe or write a book about the process. In the beginning, it was just for fun. I planted green and brown cotton varieties about 100 feet apart in my garden. I found out later that the recommended isolation distance is 660 feet for home use, longer for pure seed. Although not evident that year in the fiber, crosses between the varieties began to show up the next year. However, since the color at harvest is muted, I did not notice some brown in with the green, nor was I looking for it. After saving my seed and growing cotton for…

Once upon a time (as all good stories begin), I was walking along the headlands at Land’s End in southern England. The hedgerows were rich with hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, holly, and a lanky, leafy, weedy-looking plant that looked, I thought, just like stinging nettle. Just like in my backyard at home! I heedlessly grabbed a handful, and sure enough—stinging nettle. The more I walked along, nursing my poor hand, the more nettle I saw in the understory. It had sprung up everywhere in the fertile, moist soil. It’s a wonderful weed, really: rich in nutrients, effective for a wide range of maladies, delicious in soups, stews, salads, wherever you might use spinach, once you soak off or strip off the vicious little spines that inject you with histamines, formic acid,…

Excerpted from Keepers of the Sheep: Knitting in Morocco’s High Atlas and Beyond Author’s Note: From 2017 to 2020, I worked with Amazigh shepherds in the High Atlas Mountains to document the oral knitting patterns they had learned from their forefathers. These patterns are like basic recipes and are used specifically with handspun yarn. Rather than relying on gauge swatches, they require the knitter to try on the garment as it is made, resulting in something that will fit any size. The following sock pattern is based on the “Tqasher Qadeem” or “Old Sock” pattern that was taught to me by Hussein Mardi. Hussein knit only plain colored socks with tall cuffs. For the Ntaidrin pattern, I eliminated the cuff and added motifs that are used in knitting from the…

As it so often does, it started with a pretty picture. A textbook diagram showing the solar absorption spectrum was illustrated as a glorious rainbow of vivid color interrupted by black lines revealing the chemical composition of the sun. I even made an embroidery of that solar absorption spectrum from lots of different colors of thread. In the years since, I’ve learned to spin and often wonder if I could achieve such vibrant hues—the colors of the rainbow—through blending from a limited palette. But, unless the fiber was already dyed that bright, I'd never had much success blending saturated color until I took a deeper dive into color theory and inspiration from painters. WHAT IS A CO-PRIMARY COLOR PALETTE? In theory, primary colors are those unattainable by mixing, and you…

Color inspiration is everywhere around us. I love grabbing a piece of the city others might not see beauty in and refining it into a bold and vibrant shade. How did you get into your craft? I began knitting in college at George Washington University after a dear friend suggested the hobby. It was when Stitch ’n Bitch [by Debbie Stoller, 2004] was out and all the third-wave feminists were knitting. My friend thought I would be into it and, clearly, she was right. How did you shift from hobby to business? My first job in the industry was at a local yarn store in Washington, DC. While working there, I noticed that very few yarn store owners, dyers, or publishers were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). I…

Pattern and designer Radiata by Nim Teasdale (@nimble_knits). Fiber Merino with Angelina. Wheel system/spindle Kromski Polonaise. Drafting method Woolen long draw. Singles direction Z-twist. Ply wraps per inch 14–16. Total yardage About 750 yards. Yarn classification/weight Fingering. Yardage used About 750 yards plus 1 yard. Needles Size 5 (3.75 mm). Finished size 42" diameter. Anyone who knows me knows that stars and moons and gradients are my thing. For years, I’d been talking about knitting a night sky that I could wear, but it was a challenge I never seemed prepared to take on. I had a set of gradient fibers sitting in my secret stash—because of course I have to stash favorite fiber—that was too pretty to use. Then one day, I decided out of the blue that it was…

Studying Fred Gerber’s books and articles published in the late 1960s through 1970s has been a part of my recent journey revisiting the work and personalities of my fiber past. While Fred, a botanist by training, was involved in a wide range of textile and other art practices, it is his work in natural dyes that is most known. Fred’s articles were published in several magazines, and his three monographs Indigo and the Antiquity of Dyeing, Cochineal and the Insect Dyes, and The Investigative Method of Natural Dyeing and other Dye Articles were written in 1977 and 1978. These monographs were known for their inspiration to natural dyers, and the simple format made them inexpensive to purchase. The Investigative Method of Natural Dyeing is a collection of his published articles with one…

Xam Tai village, a tiny dot on the map of Houaphan Province in northeast Laos, is a study in earth tones. With rutted roads of dusty browns and tan, stilted houses of aged wooden posts and unfinished board siding, and thick, dry, gray-brown roof thatch, this seems like an unlikely home for some of the most vibrant, spectrum-spanning natural dye colors in the world. Let’s take a look at one. MAKING RED The rich red so central to Xam Tai’s ceremonial textiles is courtesy of a small insect, Coccus lacca (or Kerria lacca), one of the species of lac insects. The insect is a parasite that feeds on the sap of trees that grow in the jungle. The dye has a long history and was first collected and farmed in…

Have you ever looked at something beautiful and thought, “I could do that”? The hubris of the fiber artist strikes again as I scroll through the beautiful sunset pictures on social media, wondering how hard it would be to capture the incredible display of color. As a handspinner and beginner rigid-heddle weaver, I set out to see if I could apply the principles I’ve seen used in planned pooling for knit and crochet to build a clasped-weft weaving, mimicking all the colors of the wind. In knitting and crochet, planned pooling is where a skein of yarn is space-dyed in a specific pattern so that when you work a particular number of stitches, the colors “pool” together and create a pattern—magical! Using this method, my plan was to start with…