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.
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