The Year of Spinning Cellulose Fibers, Join me

I declare this my year of CELLULOSE!  I've taught cellulose classes twice in MI and VA, plus GA, NY, and OH.  I'm still scheduled for more of the same classes at MFF, OR, and SAFF. Cellulose is any fiber that doesn't come from an animal.  Not WOOL.

These incredible fibers are obtained from plants, like the seed hair - cotton or the bast fibers; flax, hemp, and ramie. They're perfect for spinning fine and creating beautiful weaving yarns. The first photo has natural and yellow dyed flax plus white ramie yarns shown as skeins and woven into a table mat.

The earrings are 2-ply handspun flax, which is perfect for any Irish Crochet patterns you might have.  I will point out that once flax is spun, it magically becomes linen under your fingertips.

Cotton yarns are soft and supple.  The brown cotton yarns in the third photo are plied with soysilk and knit into a summer scarf.  This year we are featuring Sarepta brown cotton fibers from Louisiana.  In Cotton classes, I always start students spinning the cotton while still attached to seeds.  Then we move into the ginned lint and finally the rovings.

In most workshops, we have time to do a comparison dyeing to show how the same dye, prep, and concentration change by the fiber involved. Don't forget to bring an apron and rubber gloves.

Banana fibers, historically called abaca, were stripped from the leaf sheath of a non-edible type of banana plant.  Sometimes this fiber was called Manilla Hemp.  The banana fiber we'll use is harvested from the entire Banana stalks and leaves left after the plant has finished fruiting.

Not only are they not wool, they don't act like wool, they don't feel like wool or spin like wool.  Sign up today, at Michigan Fiber Festival or Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair.

Patsy Zawistoski