Linen is a fabric I have come very lately to love.  All my life I stayed away from linen clothing because it wrinkles so quickly and so badly.  Why would anyone buy a shirt that as quickly as you put it on, looks like you slept in it?  The fact that people explained how good it felt to wear and how much cooler it was in the summer did not impress me.  I thought of linen as a flash from the past, an odd holdover from the time when people didn't have air conditioning.  Oh, how wrong I was.

My husband and I were in Rome a few years ago and at one of the hotels where we stayed, we slept on linen sheets.  It was amazing.  The sheets were cool but not cold, not smooth like high thread count cotton sheets, but much more comfortable.  I started looking for linen sheets for our bed at home.  Then last year, Peggy and I were demonstrators at the Texas Renaissance Festival.  Of course, we needed costumes.  While the linen chemise was a bit more expensive than the cotton version, I opted for slightly more realism and ordered the linen.  Again, I was amazed.  Linen is heavier than cotton but so much better.  It was warmer on the cold days and cooler on the warm days.  It's texture is somehow comforting to the skin.  Linen is an anomaly among fabric types because it is stronger wet than dry.  It means you can wash it in the washing machine without harming it but must hang it up to dry.  Putting it in the dryer will break down the fibers.

The logical extension of my new found love of linen was to weave with it.  I do a lot of kitchen towels made out of Cottolin, a blend of 60% cotton and 40% linen.  It is strong and absorbent and just keeps getting softer and softer as you use it.  And it can be washed in the washing machine and dried in the dryer.  The perfect kitchen towel!  But it is not the same as 100% cotton any more than it's the same as 100% linen so I approached my first linen weaving project with the knowledge that there would be a learning curve.  And there was.

The project was a dresser scarf for my daughter.  Katy has an old china cabinet base that she uses as a dresser.  It came from her grandparents and has seen a lot of wear and tear over the years.  It has some stains on the top and Katy wanted a nice sturdy something to conceal them.  She picked a woven lace pattern in natural unbleached linen.  OK.  It may be that I picked the linen, but I know Katy picked the pattern and color.

Linen yarn is very stiff.  It doesn't feel like it will make something you would want to handle.  I had faith it would soften up when I washed the finished product and I was right.  Here are the weaving details - natural 16/2 wet spun line linen, sett 20 epi, five thread spot huck lace pattern, assumed 15% shrinkage.  Here is the fabric right off the loom:

And here it is after being washed and ironed:

I'm really pleased with the project.  And, of course, there were lessons to learn.  Linen isn't very forgiving when it comes to the selvages so they don't look as good as I hope the next linen project will.  It likes a high tension on the warp and a heavy beat.  It doesn't full very much but does soften.  The next step is spinning flax into linen thread....

Inspiration is a funny thing.  It can be all around you in the colors and patterns and textures of life, in the juxtaposition of items you would never put together, in the buds of spring, the drifts of snow, the heat coming off a hot engine.  Or it can just be gone and you fear you'll never find it again.  I've spent the last part of winter and this early spring with not much inspiration.  As I've gotten older, I find I'm much more influenced by the weather than I ever used to be.  When it's been dark and gloomy for more than two or three days, I start to droop.  The sun brightens everything including my mood and my inspiration.  But we've had a lot of gloomy, raining, windy, stormy days this year.

On President's Day we had glorious sun.  I was just getting over a horrible cold and finally felt like I was up to venturing out in the world again.  Peggy and I met our friends Nancy and Janet for a fun day of shopping.  One of the places we visited was Yarntopia in Katy.  Yarntopia is our most favorite local yarn store.  Sheryl and Amy, the owners, are wonderful, funny and first class enablers when in comes to knitting yarn.  After months, or is it years?, of inspiration-less plodding through life, I found wonderful yarn that will be my next shawl.

After Janet had to head home and Nancy went back to her wonderful goats, Peggy and I stopped at the Lone Star Loom Room, our favorite local weaving store.  Once the inspiration is really all around you, you just keep seeing things that look wonderful.  I found Cottolin (60% Cotton and 40% Linen) that made me smile and some wonderful hand painted linen that was stunning.  So here are my next kitchen towels:

I feel like a shadow has been lifted.  I have three great projects ready to go.  When?  Not real sure.  Life keeps interfering, but they are now officially on the list and I'll get to them soon.  Inspiration is pretty cool.

Woad is a wonderful plant.  It is the historic Northern European source for indigo, grown there for hundreds of years until other sources of indigo made their way westward from the far east.  Woad doesn't have an much indigo in it as the Japanese and far eastern indigo plants but is a hardier grower in northern climes.

I have to tell you why I'm so thrilled to have woad growing here.  Last spring I bought a ton of plant seeds, mostly mixed wildflower seeds that will grow happily here in Texas, but also dye plant seeds.  Coreopsis, woad, madder, marigolds, purple basil, fennel - basically every seed I could get for a plant that gives color.  I also had sunflower seeds I had bought intending to plant them for my goats.  Goats love sunflowers.  All parts of the plant - leaves, stems, seeds, flowers - are good for goats.  You get the idea.  I had lots of seed.  The wildflower seed packets said that planting in fall is the best way to go.  Well, I have never been known for my patience.  It's all I can do to leave a dye bath overnight.  I know the color is better that way but mostly I can't stand waiting that long.  So here I had all these seeds and was supposed to wait for months?  Not likely.  Most of the seeds I scattered over my newly installed septic drain field.  I thought this would go a long way in encouraging people not to drive on the drain field.  No one is likely to drive through a beautiful field of flowers.  The woad seeds I planted in one of our 7' diameter raised garden bins.  The bins have always been intended for dye plants.  They are behind the studio and I can stand inside and look at them.  And watch my dye plants grow.

So the wildflowers seeds are out front on the drain field and the woad seeds are in a garden bin.  This is May.  Well, last summer was the hottest and driest one on record for decades.  I started off watering daily as the temperature climes.  As the drought got worse, I switched from watering the wildflowers and dye plants to watering the trees.  Fortunately, all the trees made it but I had completely given up on my newly planted seeds.  The drought ended with the winter rains.  Lots of winter rain.  And cold.  Much colder than normal.  Then more rain.  This is a good cycle for most wildflowers but what about my woad?

I checked the drain field area and sure enough, I have wildflowers coming up.  Texas Bluebonnets and lots of other things I can't recognize yet.  I'm hopeful we will have lots of wildflowers later this spring.  Then I checked the garden bins.  Eureka!  I have woad plants!

Woad is an enthusiastic re-seeder.  It's considered a noxious weed in the western US where it can take over vast acreages in only a couple of seasons. Interestingly, if you let it go to seed, you don't get any indigo.  The normal plan is to plant it early in the spring and harvest the leaves throughout the summer.  Once the first frost comes, no more indigo.  If you leave the plant to overwinter, in the spring it will bloom and produce prodigious seeds.  For dyers it makes sense to let one plant go to seed for the next years crop but to pull out the rest so the woad won't take over your garden, or yard, or the county.

So the question is.... is my woad in its first year or in it's second?  We will see.  If it goes to seed, I've missed the indigo.  If it doesn't, I'll be harvesting leaves this summer.  I think I'll order more seeds and plant them next month.  That way I'll have my own home grown indigo this summer.  Cool!