Dyer Interview: Lynne Vogel, Twisted Sister

A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Tricia Hunt of Spinning Wheel Studio. At the end, when I asked her who she'd love to see interviewed here, she directed me without hesitation to Lynne Vogel. I contacted Lynne and somewhat timidly asked her whether she'd be willing to do an interview with me; she replied right away that she would! So I started to research and as I did so, I realized that her book, The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook: Dyeing, Painting, Spinning, Designing, Knitting, was not only already on my bookshelf but was one that I had used big time when learning to dye yarn & spinning fiber. I re-read the book so I wouldn't be asking dumb questions, and realized that the book is so comprehensive, she had already answered a lot of the questions that I had already prepared! But this was cool, because I was able to ask her some follow-up Q's about things that I had been wondering about...

In your book, you describe learning wonderful things by accident - is there any experience you wouldn't mind relating in detail?

In my Harrisville dye class every year, we save every ounce of unused dye in a big kettle we call the "soup". Everything we pour down the drain there goes into a holding tank that has to be pumped out and the thought of dye in there really grosses me out. So we save it all up and at the end of the week I go down to the dye area and exhaust the soup. Last year, even though we had the soup in two big canning kettles, we had no heat source to heat the kettles because we'd been using the microwaves exclusively! And there was tons of dye in that soup.

So I just started plunging dry superwash bfl wool roving into the soup (with big gloves on, of course). I heat set each one in the microwave. Dye strikes superwash wool to some degree even when the dyebath is cold, and I figured that putting the fiber in dry would give it a little more absorbancy, and it did. For the first pound of fiber I ladled some of the soup into a ziplock baggie with the fiber and stuck it in the microwave, getting dark teal and peat brown. About 3 pounds of fiber later I could see that the soup was really exhausting and I had a lot of beautiful mid-range browns and teals with some really fun bleeds. The lighter colors were even more interesting, especially because putting dry roving in the solution caused the dye to strike very unevenly. As the dye exhausted and the resulting colors became lighter, the bleeds were even more obvious. This translated to teal roving with pale rose pink bleed and brown with silver grey green and a touch of orange! And the browns...straight from the earth browns, browns it would take me an entire day to match. We ended up with over 5 pounds of gorgeous muted colors from the soup and everybody went home with some. Some people spun them for socks and hats (really great guy colors too). I've since spun some of them into art yarns. I love the fancy textures of art yarns worked in understated colors and neutrals. I wouldn't have chosen to handpaint rovings with these colors because they are too subtle to look enticing online, but when people see the yarns I've spun from them, they always want more.

Why did the soup give such a variety of colors? Was it because the dyes separated out as the heat was applied?

The dyes separated out even before heat was applied. You can see this happen especially with dilutions with the cold pour technique. This happens most readily with washfast acid dyes, not so much with sabraset. The reason being that different colors strike at different rates. Yellow strikes first or at lowest temps, red (pink) next, then blue last. That's why it takes the longest time to exhaust a blue dyebath. No matter how you mix the colors, in powder, stock solution, direct application, or immersion, this is still true to some degree. Also, when I put the fiber in, I took 4 ounce hanks and grabbed them, pressing them in dry. Where I was grabbing the fiber I was forming a resist, so less dye struck at those points. The fiber can resist itself too when it's in tight coils. Those resisted areas were the ones that showed the bleed from the separation of the dyes.

What made you want to start dyeing yarn/fiber? Was it simply that you had become a spinner?

Photo: Jim Ann Howard
(from The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook)

Actually, I learned to dye before I became a spinner. Back then I was selling my knitted pieces in galleries, combining handspun and millspun yarns. I could never seem to find the colors I wanted in the yarn I wanted. I'd been a painter since I was a kid. My dad taught me how to mix any color under the sun in paint. In the early 80s I had a job painting custom needlepoint canvases for a shop in California. It used to frustrate me so to try to match yarn colors to the canvases they carried in the shop, because no matter how many colors they had, and they had tons, there were never enough. So I would pull the yarns for my designs and match them with my paint when I painted my own designs. So you can imagine how hard it was for me to try to find yarn colors in knitting yarns.

When I lived in Taos, I worked primarily with La Lana Wools' beautiful naturally dyed yarns. I also spent a summer as an assistant to a local weaver who taught me natural dyeing. But those colors are like found objects, often very muted and difficult to repeat. I had watched Rachel Brown dye with acid dyes in Taos, but it was daunting. She had huge cauldrons set up outside over an open wood fire, with pulleys for the skeins (often pounds at a time) hung from massive logs suspended over the dyepots. Once the water came to a simmer, she would throw in a carefully calculated spoonful of dye powder and lower her weighed skeins into the color. Her calculations were always perfect, and the skeins would completely exhaust the dye, whether she was dyeing solids or partial skeins. She would always end up with clear water in the cauldron between dippings. Of course it would be prohibitive to change the water in those cauldrons, so she had to be right the first time. And that's not to mention feeding the fire with cedar logs. It seemed like alchemy at the time.

So when Twisted Mother Sandy showed me how to work with acid dye stock solutions I was back in native territory...paint. Before long I could get any color I wanted and my work at the time usually combined both natural and synthetic dyes in perfect harmony. An example would be my Tree of Life Jacket in Knitting in America (now called America Knits) and the Chinese Tree of Life in Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters. Luisa Gelenter, master natural dyer behind La Lana Wools, once told me that few ever attempted to combine natural and synthetic dyes in a single work, as they were so difficult to combine. I guess I took this as a challenge! Learning to dye with acid type dyes completely satisfied my color glutton.

One thing that really jumped out at me today was this: "Twisted Mother Sandy invited me into her kitchen to learn her pour-dye methods. In my mind I felt like I was being dragged kicking and screaming to perform some horrible tedious task...." I really related to this! I have all kinds of creativity-related fears. Do you have these? How do you get past the fear of failure?

In any creative endeavor, each new project requires risk. Many folks are uncomfortable with risk or don't have the time it takes to sail into uncharted waters, so they stick to tested patterns and yarns and this is fine. But trying something new requires risk. Will I have to do it over? Will this color match something I already have? Sometimes this element of risk is exciting and drives me to experiment, other times it stops me dead in the water. It helps to determine the exact nature of the fear especially because that fear can come for a different reason every time I start something new.

Photo: Jim Ann Howard
(from The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook)

Fears can sometimes just be dislikes disguised as fear. For instance, I hate to waste materials. I can be very tight that way. Not having enough fiber to properly experiment with a colorway or trying to work something out perfectly with very little time is a limitation I regularly inflict on myself. I often come out on top which only encourages me to do it again. But if I know I'm not going to run out of fiber or yarn, if I know I have plenty of time, stress subsides.

Another fear comes from performance anxiety. Who am I trying to please? Myself or the world? Are people watching me, as in a class demo? Again, it's important to keep my intention clear. If I please myself with my work, then there is joy in it and everyone that sees it responds to the joy. If I'm in front of a group of people, I focus on my love of sharing rather than my nervousness at being watched or judged. If I approach a project with anxiety, it's never going to be as strong as if I approach it with a positive intention. Often I find that I backing off, trying again later, waiting for the perfect moment only leads to procrastination and cold feet and this snuffs out the flame of invention. I get around this by setting up a work area with care, collecting my materials, cordoning off my time, and sometimes, just sitting and meditating for a moment before I start (which sometimes manifests in the form of a big gulp of air and a swan dive). Even if I only have one talisman of my comfort zone, (good music for instance), I have something positive to help me along, something to help me relax and focus. I never have enough room, enough time, enough energy, so if I waited for that kind of comfort I'd never do anything.

For instance when I first tried to learn to spin, I was selling my work in galleries and couldn't learn to spin fast enough, well enough to make spinning worth my while. I had to have yarn I could sell at a good price. It took so long to complete pieces that time was money, something I wouldn't let myself have to learn a new tool. But when I finally decided to spin that yarn for myself...my own sweater? I was spinning in no time. Pressure off. I think that dealing with anxiety is like tempering a flame on a gas stove. I need enough heat to get myself going, but not so much that I'll boil over or burn out. Removing some, but not all, of the pressure of risk seems to work best for me.

Handspun Bound Boucle Yarn in "Black Hollyhocks," 122 yds

When I teach workshops I feel that my most important job is to help class participants to open to their own muse. It's not about "do as I do". It's about "if you do it this way, you'll get this". It doesn't matter if we are spinning, knitting, dyeing. As soon as people start paying attention to what they are actually doing, the relax into themselves, start to see what they actually can do and their vision sprouts from there. It's like having both feet firmly planted. Fear of failure is really just a belief that one is incapable of performing a task, but it can feel like one is about to leap off a cliff. If you start with what you know you can do and build on that, every moment you spend increases your experience and ability. Your "failures" are really just mistakes of a sort and only increase your knowledge. Cuz they tell you, "if I do that, I'll get this". As my friend and fellow dyer Mary Ann Pagano of Three Waters Farm says, "If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn". And I have definitely learned more from my mistakes than my successes.

Is there any technique you would like to learn how to do (related to dyeing)?

Can you believe I'm still an Indigo virgin? Sure, I could try it by myself, but I want to do it with somebody who has done it before. Why? It's one of the oldest and most revered dyeing techniques in the world. I look at indigo dyeing as an art form in itself. I think I'm waiting because I'd rather use indigo on fabric than yarn or fiber, because it does rub off when you spin and knit with it. And it's so beautiful on fabric. Soon....

Lastly, I know you do sometimes purchase fiber from other dyers; is there an indie dyer out there whose work you especially admire?

There are lots of them. First I'd like to say that I consider any handpainted or handdyed piece (fiber, yarn, whatever) to be a found object. The most beautiful ones can't be replicated. And yeah, I could remember their colors and go home and copy them to a great degree (though never exactly...I can't even do that with my own work), but that wouldn't be right either. It's important to appreciate the work of others and reward it accordingly. Also, when I purchase someone else's work, it isn't just the colors that are important to me. The handle of the fiber, whether it's soft or harsh, whether it smells good, whether (in the case of fiber) it drafts easily, all of these elements go into my ultimate appreciation. So although I've seen a lot of work that looks beautiful online, if I haven't held it in my hand I can't recommend it to others. So, my first choice is Three Waters Farm. Mary Ann dyes my colorways as well as her own beautiful creations and furnishes the fiber for my workshops. I can always count on the draftability, the softness, the sweet fragrance as well as the beautiful colors, both radiant and subtle. I'd also like to mention Woolgatherings, now in its second generation. Twisted Mom Sandy started Woolgatherings in the late '80s and her daughter-in-law Kate is carrying it forward with her own totally different color sensibility. I love what Carol Larsen of River's Edge Fiber Arts is doing with totally unique fiber blends. There are so many wonderful dyers out there who don't dye full time who sell their work at fairs or on Etsy. Enjoy the hunt, it's half the fun.


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Lynne Vogel's latest book is The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters: A Knit-to-Fit Workshop. You can follow her doings as she blogs at Handspun Central. And finally, be sure to check out her original patterns and gorgeous handspun art yarns at http://lynnevogel.etsy.com.