Monday, October 24, 2016

Coton Jaune Revisited

Inspired by Sharon Gordon Donnan's beautiful documentary: Coton Jaune, Acadian Brown Cotton that I saw last year after encouraging our library to sponsor a showing of her film, I decided I wanted to create my own Coton Jaune blanket.

Sharon's film did a beautiful job capturing the story behind the French Canadian Acadian women who migrated to Louisiana from Quebec and spun and wove beautiful blankets.  i knew I wanted to try my hand at it.  Sharon gave me a source for ginned brown cotton from a gentleman in Louisiana who has about 5 acres that he set aside to grow brown cotton, Anthony Mullins.  And I had ordered some cotton sliver  in natural and natural mixed with brown cotton.  Most of it I took to Ossabaw Island to dye in the indigo vats at a workshop I took with Donna Hardy of Sea Island Indigo.  So it was time to get started spinning!  I used my supported drop spindle for some and my Kromski Fantasia spinning wheel.



I warped my Mighty Wolf 8 shaft loom as soon as we got back home from spending the summer on our sailboat.  I was able to speed the process up a bit by tying each warp thread to  "dummy warp"  that saved my threading and sleying. After winding the 7+ yard warp of various natural cotton yarns onto the back beam I was ready to start weaving.



Weaving in the Saori way on 8 shafts enabled me to create with a variety of patterns and techniques highlighting the variety of yarns I handspun interspersed with the various commercial cotton yarns I had used in the warp.  It was exciting to get started weaving and when I finally took it off the loom following our evacuation due to Hurricane Matthew, I was delighted to see the outcome as I laid it out down the hall.