natural dyeing day with japanese visitors

 Recently I spent the day At Nandroya Studio with a group of Japanese visiting craft ladies. Joy had prepared a workshop on natural dyes from Tasmania. We used native cherry with  three different mordents. These were alum, copper and iron.

 Joy had even created a wonderful sample card . It was a great day and a lot was learnt by everyone. Joy has such fantastic knowledge about dyes and weaving and is a fantastic host and teacher.

viking tunic

 I have finished the Viking tunic. In the end I decided to machine sew the tunic as I was worried the edges would fray and eventually unravel. As it was all very dark in colour I decided it needed some colour to brighten it up by way of a tablet woven band. I read up on the traditional Viking designs and set off to make a band, but as a novice tablet weaver I found the number of cards used and the pattern too hard and I could not create the correct tension on the band so I un warped the tablets and started again with a less ambitious pattern. This worked out much better. I had hoped to use the band to fully cover the raw edges of the tunic but found I was not able to weave a band that wide so I had to just put the band on the outside, therefore not hiding the messy seam edge on the inside of the tunic.

I was very happy in the finished piece and it has been worn out to an SCA event and kept my son very warm, it may be a little too warm for summer though.