Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Green cotton

Every insomniac knows, there's a point in the night when one realizes that sleep simply won't come.  For me, it's usually Monday nights, I don't know why, perhaps it's just the horrible notion that Tuesdays hate me.

Instead of venturing to the land of nod, I spent the night spinning cotton.

I call this colour - ghost of green

Beautiful, natural colours of cotton.  I'm fascinated and inspired that cotton has so many natural colours.  Browns, golden, bage, green, red, white, and I bet even more.  For more on naturally coloured cotton, check out FoxFibre - Sally Fox has some amazing cotton plants that she's bred over the years, 


off white, unbleached cotton
These days I'm working on my support spindle skill - perfecting my cotton spinning on a takli spindle.  It's very portable and fast.  Not to mention, it fits an impressive amount of thread on the shaft before needing to unwind.

Sometimes I feel like using my charkha wheel.


I've even been playing with cotton bolls and discovering different ways of preparing the fibre for spinning.



Then there's the plant...


These days, every time I want to grow something exotic, someone tells me 'it won't grow here'.  In the past, I've believed them, only to find the next year that everyone is growing it.

So this year, I've stopped believing them and decided to try cotton for myself.  So far it's right on schedule.  Don't know if it will make fibre yet or not, but hope it does.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice photos of spindles. And there is many kinds of them. Cottons flower was nice, getting it to make a flower is a good achievement!
Jani

Josiane said...

So sorry that you have sleepless nights... Spinning sounds like a good activity in such circumstances. As always, your spinning is really nice, and colour-grown organic cotton is indeed lovely. Do you have plans for your cotton yarn? I really want to learn how to spin cotton one of these days, so that I can play with those lovely colours and then weave some pretty, handspun, organic cotton fabric...