Isabella Whitworth

probably more than natural and synthetic dyes, wax, resists, and history

Category Archives: Fibre


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We have Turkey Red

Not the final day of the course, but the final day of dyeing.  We have been through all the processes used in dyeing Turkey Red through a long sequence of carefully managed samples prepared by tutor Deb Bamford. Today we dyed the final stage. The temperature of the dyepot was raised and maintained and the prepared fabric was immersed, with one of the group stirring it continuously.

Turkey Red

Turkey Red

At the end of the dye period, we lifted the cotton from the pot. We had achieved a good, characteristic, Turkey Red. 

Various experiments and variations continued in the room and explanations and notes added to ‘the wall’.

Tomorrow is the last day and for tutors and students, it finishes at noon. For our course, the morning will be spent sorting and sharing samples and  clarifying processes.

Deb Bamford is highly organised; if she hadn’t been, this intensely complex course could have descended to chaos and dyeing mightn’t have been completed accurately, safely, or at all. Deb explained everything clearly and directly; she really knows her stuff. The student group has been pleasant, co-operative and multi-skilled, which has added to an enjoyable (and valuable) week.

The Trade Fair opened at the Summer School this afternoon with stands selling spinning and weaving equipment, yarns, books, fabrics and trimmings. I helped set up the stand for the Journal for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers for which I work as a volunteer editor.

Tomorrow classrooms and the Trade Fair are open to the public. In the evening there is a Gala Dinner with a speaker, and then it will be time to pack up and go home.

Finishing the Turkey Red cloth
Skeins from the Ethel Mairet recipe
Muslin bags containing boiled madder chips
Water tests continue
Samples and notes
Celebrating Turkey Red with Domaine de la Garance

Two unrelated observations: it has been a great luxury to be on a course as a student and not a tutor, but it’s peculiar that I am more tired this way round.

The other is that they have some mighty fierce mosquitoes in Wales. I had hoped there was an interesting word for mosquito in Welsh, but it seems it’s mosgito. Oh.


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Day 4 and madder: sorry about the quilts

I have been writing Summer School blogs late at night and I am forgetting to include things. Here’s what I forgot yesterday: images of the textiles from the Welsh Quilt Centre at Lampeter. They should have been attached to yesterday’s post.

Quilt detail, Welsh Quilt Centre
Antique Welsh quilt, detail
Summer School visitors at the Welsh Quilt Centre showing contemporary quilts also on display
Antique Welsh quilts
Antique Welsh quilt, detail
Antique Welsh quilt

Today, Turkey Red preparations continued and we started to plan the ordering, labelling and displaying of the various samples dyed on the course. We are working in the art college (Coleg Sir Gar) in a Life Room; it’s part of a larger suite divided by folding screens. The screens are also whiteboards and we can write on them with markers, which makes displaying and explaining samples a bit easier. An exchange visit with students on Helen Melvin’s eco-dyeing course took place this afternoon and they could see the first samples together with their recipes and comments from the groups that had dyed them.

Measuring, grinding and sieving are part of the dye process
Hand-grinding madder root
Froth on the madder vat: a slight fermentation is taking place
Red skeins
Samples from Gervaise Markham’s 1615 recipe
Some good reds drying in the sun
List of water sources

‘If you would dye wool into a perfect red colour..’ begins Gervaise Markham’s 1615 recipe from his book The English Huswife. I am in a group-within-a-group on the course; we excel at producing dispiriting pinks from recipes which boast all manner of ‘perfect reds’ as their outcome.  I think we have even astonished tutor Debbie by our unerring skill in this regard.

From the selection above, guess which yarn is ours after trying Markham’s recipe. No prizes.


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Madder, wool and Welsh quilts

In the dye room this morning we reground the fourth and final exhaust dyestuff for the Turkey Red samples and heated it to temperature so that it could cool before dyeing tomorrow. Debbie has hung the Turkey Red-prepared cloth in the college smoking shelter – which might well discourage smokers from entering and be very good for overall Welsh health.

smoking

Smelly smoking shelter

Many madder recipes state that one should not raise the temperature of the dyepot above a certain point or the colours will turn brown.  On the other hand, many recipes have silk or wool boiling for as much as an hour. So what’s going on?

Jill Goodwin advises a maximum of 158 F (70 C). We were careful to follow her recipe yesterday, but today someone suggested we should boil one of the Goodwin skeins to see if  it would affect the colour.

So we did, and it didn’t…. and it set us thinking where such advice originates and under what, if any, circumstances it might be true.

If you read yesterday’s blog you’ll know I wasn’t sure where we were going on our outing: it turned out to be the National Wool Museum at Dre-fach Felindre and the Welsh Quilt Centre at Lampeter.

Our visit to the museum was interesting but short and there were far too many of us for a comfortable visit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching the spinning mule in action, and touring the finishing and weaving sheds. Across in the field was a tenterframe for stretching and finishing cloth, and a windhouse for drying more delicate fabric. The tenterframe looked squeaky-new and unhistoric (do Ikea offer a selection?)  but gave some idea of how the field might once have looked.

I came across a set of natural-dyed yarns produced by David and Margaret Redpath who, until 2002, ran Wallis Mill in Pembrokeshire. It was the last commercial mill in Wales to dye with plant materials. The dye garden behind the wool museum was sadly neglected and overgrown with weeds, although some madder was struggling plantfully on.

Yarn samples natural dyed by the Redpath
Tenterframe and windhouse
View of mill interior
Spinning mule
Loom from above showing cloth cut off

The Quilt Centre at Lampeter is in the old Town Hall. Currently, and until November, a collection of antique Welsh quilts is on display with work by Kaffe Fassett and other contemporary quiltmakers. There was a time when this modern work would have held all my attention, but now I am old and grey it was the monochrome historic textiles I found the most beautiful. The collection has been put together by Jen Jones, who realised several years ago that these lovely bedcovers were being discarded as having no value. In a short address to the group, Jen said that she had once seen a farmer using an old quilt to keep a sick cow warm. The Quilt Centre exhibition was superbly done, with work suspended at different angles and heights from an immensely high ceiling. Complexities of lighting were skilfully handled so that nothing appeared overshadowed.

crossover

This collection is by Moda Fabrics and is called Indigo Crossing

In Calico Kate,  a shop for quilting enthusiasts almost next door, I found a set of printed cottons in the blue and white derived from the traditional patterns of resist-dyed indigo. These fabrics seem to be following me around: see this post from earlier this year.

A reminder to anyone following in real time that you can follow AGWSD Summer School at Carmarthen through the posts of several students here on Twitter, using the hashtag #wsdsschool


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Even madder dyeing: Summer School, Carmarthen

The first task of the day was to devise a test sequence of Turkey Red dyeing in which a full solution of soaked and ground madder would be used to dye with, then the dyestuff re-ground and re-used to test the exhaust of each previous phase. It is expected that each phase will produce lighter tones than the last, but dyed cotton may also shift in colour as various chemicals are taken up in the dyeing at each stage. The four groups in the course undertook a stage of grinding and re-grinding, and then the cloth dyeing. At the end of the second day we are half way through this exercise. Each stage takes a while to complete.

The sheep-dunged cotton from yesterday was first worked in the oily emulsion prepared from olive oil and potassium carbonate. It was then divided up for the four dye stages.

Grinding madder in a liquidiser
Pans of soaking madder. Foreground shows madder for Jill Goodwin’s recipe; background Turkey Red dye
Working the oily emulsion into prepared cotton for Turkey Red
Dyed Turkey Red from first and strongest madder solution

While this exercise continued through the day, each group worked on recipes selected from Debbie’s suggested choices. My group completed dyeing silk according to a historic recipe (Haarlem Manuscript 281/1/1)  republished in Judith Hofenk de Graaf’s book The Colourful Past. The results were pale and salmony, not the ‘beautiful red’ we had hoped for. We must re-check calculations and compare results with another group using the same recipe.

The Jill Goodwin recipe we are using has turned out more successful. Madder had been soaked overnight with two tsps powdered chalk (calcium carbonate). This morning it was placed on the stove and over the period of an hour (and before the yarn was put in it) the temperature raised to a definitive ‘no more than 158F’.  Goodwin’s instructions are somewhat stern on temperature and I guarded it with a thermometer and my life. The dyebath developed  a very marked purple foam but in the wool yarn dyeing there was no shift from the expected madder shade. The yarn is resting in the cooled dyepot so I have no picture yet.

During the day a small group studied the water analyses brought in by students to accompany their 5 litre water samples. This revealed that the softest water comes from the water in my area, West Devon.

Water and analysis sheets
Yarn drying in the college sculpture yard
Yarn dyeing in Devon water
Comparing analysis sheets
Turkey Red cotton (background) with various samples of madder-dyed wool and silk

Tomorrow is a half day at Summer School and we off on a trip to the National Wool Museum at Dre-fach Felindre. At least, I think it’s there we’re going: my piece of paper doesn’t confirm the destination. No doubt we will find out when we get there. If it isn’t Dre-fach Felindre, it will be somewhere else.


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Shibori, sheep and the power of six

Last week I tutored a day-course in shibori techniques at Ardington School of Crafts. Ardington is a village on the edge of the Berkshire Downs. The venue is housed in a Victorian school, and its large windows ensure good light at all times. It has been imaginatively and calmly adapted for its current incarnation as a craft school and overlooks a traditional English landscape of farmland and trees. This week, with fine weather and leaves at the multiple-greens stage, everything looked at its best.

Students were introduced to the basic principles of shibori and how patterns will build in the fabric through what is a mathematical logic of repeating folds and layers. We worked principally with the equilateral triangular fold which creates hexagon-based patterns through its geometry of six equilateral triangles. I prepared a set of triangular card units showing how this repeat principle works. The positioning (and shape) of the clamped and identical wooden blocks either side of the folded fabric is represented by the white areas in my patterns. The clamping inhibits the flow of dye through the fabric. The wood blocks can be any shape – there is a pattern created by the green-painted triangular blocks below – and placed in any practical position. Block position will dictate the basics of the pattern. You can see from the image (below right) that the blocks do not necessarily prevent dye from entering the fabric beneath the clamped area. They just affect the character of the final pattern which is based on dye dilutions, deliberate drying of work, overdyeing etc.

Individual equilateral unit with the real block and fabric
How the patterns build up
Triangular fold; clamp removed
Four ways of producing pattern from a triangular fold

Students ironed vertical folds in a scarf length and converted the strip to a stack of triangular folds. They checked the wood blocks and protected them with new clingfilm. This enables a clean start each time the blocks are used: wood absorbs dye readily and will mark  work that follows. I advise beginners to work with three colours only, plus dilutant, to avoid shades of mud. Some students admitted they had been sceptical that their seemingly random application of dye would create something so ordered and I think all were pleased with their results.

Below, you can see me opening up the steamer. This has to be done with considerable care, hence the somewhat stressed expression. You can see the roll of paper and scarves, which has been protected with foil at top and bottom to prevent drips entering the folds and spoiling the work. Note that the top piece of foil was dislodged as I lifted the chamber from the boiler.

Many thanks to the students for allowing me to post these pictures and to Faith at Ardington for taking the photos.

Opening the steamer
A particularly dramatic scarf which left areas undyed
Unrolling the paper and scarves
Students greet their steamed scarves

Other news: On Thursday 13th June, Jane Deane and I will be working on our dye research at Leewood for the final open-to-the-public time. We haven’t finished our research, but from Thursday on you can’t come to watch us. To check on details, see here.

With shearing time in Devon arriving, local flocks are looking cooler and in the summer-ish sun my nest of mason bees (Osmia) is hyperactive. The bees don’t make honeycombs (that’s another hexagon-based subject) but are laying eggs in the tubes and sealing them in various shades of Devon clay. We are lucky to have culm meadow locally which is filling with textured grasses in some summer sun. But tomorrow it is going to rain.

A very careful local shearer
Mason bees’ nest
Devon summer grasses in culm meadow


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Blue routes – blue roots

As a schoolchild, my first and much-hated needlework project was to handsew a dirndl skirt. I was on the tubby side (not much has changed) and the skirt was red with white spots. My mother probably thought it would look charming but I knew I would look like a fat ladybird so, like Penelope and her shroud, I put off finishing it and learned to sew very slowly. Dirndl skirts and I have not crossed paths again for over 50 years.

We have just been to Bavaria to attend a family event. Many guests wore traditional clothes which, for the women, meant a dirndl costume. Now I have seen what it ought to look like, I must admit that the full dirndl costume can look good on old and young – and even the tubby. It isn’t just a skirt. There is a bodice, a blouse, a full skirt and an apron. Contemporary and expensive dirndl costumes are superbly tailored and very expensive.  They can be made from silks, cottons, linen, velvet or wool depending on the season, or the event at which they are worn.

A wedding dirndl. An apron knotted at the front means the wearer is unmarried

A dirndl worn at a wedding. An apron knotted at the front means the wearer is unmarried

A characteristic of the traditional dirndl is the printed cotton from which skirt and bodice are sometimes cut. The repeat patterns are small and delicate. At one time they would have been block-printed, and the blue and white fabrics would probably have been paste-resist-printed and indigo-dyed. This fabric is increasingly rare although there are still workshops in Hungary and Austria. Eastern Europe was a strong centre for these fabrics.

Last year the Devon Guild of Craftsmen held an exhibition called Tracing the Blueprint. The exhibition told the story of ‘Blauwdruk’ fabric from Eastern Europe which made its way to South Africa via trade,  European settlers and Manchester printers. Blue and white 100% cotton fabric is now printed in South Africa, although not using a traditional process. It is known as shweshwe and the Three Cats trademark of Da Gama Textiles is famous. Shweshwe used to be transported by sea and was heavily starched to help it survive the long journey. Although this is no longer necessary, heavy starching is still used to denote its status as true shweshwe. I have a pack of shweshwe by me as I write and the smell is strong and ‘inky’, but not unpleasant.

Hungarian fabric resist-printed and indigo-dyed seen at Tracing the Blueprint
Three Cats fabric
Shweshwe fabric made by Three Cats

Last year I visited the studio of Martina Gistl near Gmünd in Bavaria. Martina screenprints traditional patterns onto cotton and linen at her studio. She has a beautiful workspace and you can look down on the printing process as she passes the ink-loaded squeegee across the fabric, forcing the ink down onto the stretched fabric. After the fabric dries it is heat-fixed (but I don’t think it’s a steam process).

The squeegee is pushed firmly across the screen
The squeegee is dragged towards the printer on the left keeping the presure even
Looking down on the print table

There is such fascination in the journeys these strongly related patterns and designs have made, their natural dye origins and their contemporary uses and interpretations.

Indigo-dyed linen fabric from Austria seen at Greif store, Rottach-Egern
The Gistl studio also prints paper, from the famous factory in Gmünd
Swatches of patterns from the Gistl workshop
Shweshwe fabric made by Three Cats
Hungarian fabric resist-printed and indigo-dyed seen at Tracing the Blueprint
Commercially printed cottons in traditional-looking patterns from the Greif store in Rottach-Egern


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Madder and goats at Leewood

This week Jane Deane and I continued our research into natural dyes on fleece, working at Leewood in the Dartmoor National Park. On our last session we used weld: this time we dyed with madder.

We have chosen to use natural dye extracts to begin with as these have greater consistency in colour from batch to batch. At the moment our research isn’t so much about finding answers as knowing which questions to ask.  We realise we may need to retest the whole sequence of five dyes using raw dyestuff,  different water, altered mordant proportion etc.

Developing colour 1
Developing colour 2
Developing colour 3
Developing colour 4
Dyed samples
Comparing exhaust dye density after removing fleece

Here are images from the day’s work showing how colour developed, the colour on fleece and the jars at the end of the session.

The sessions at Leewood are open to the public and yesterday we welcomed two visitors, one of whom was Robin Paris. Robin is a well-known and respected local batik artist whose concerns with sustainability have also led her to research the use of natural dyes with wax. You can read about this part of her work work here. Robin works mostly on cotton, a cellulose fibre, and because of this some of the problems she faces are different to mine using silk or wool, which are proteins. But there are also several common issues. I wrote here about some of them.

In May we will be working on cochineal at Leewood. We have had to change our published date of 16th May and this will be updated on my Leewood page as soon as it is confirmed.

The Leewood goats and  kids formed the cabaret as dye-day lengthened: goats are definitely madder than most animals.

At home at Leewood


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Calculating cochineal: using Lanzarote dyestuff

The historical dye research Jane Deane and I are working on at Leewood (see previous post) involves comparing ‘like with like’. For the initial weld research we used a stock solution of weld extract and divided it equally into five separate jars to dye samples of five fleece types.

Last year I undertook a dye costing with a stock solution. It was for a Somerset-based company called The Woolly Shepherd which promotes the sustainable use of wool, particularly waste fleece that would normally be thrown away. It is producing  needle-felted insulation materials, horticultural products and acoustic panels and also sells a range of small items such as wine coolers and phone covers.

The Woolly Shepherd’s felt is a darkish grey overall, being a mixture of several fleece colours and thus far they had sold all their products undyed. The company asked me to find out if its felt could be natural-dyed to achieve a certain shade of dark pink. It had obtained a sample dyed pink with synthetic dyes and I offered to try to match it as nearly as possible using cochineal, and in such a way that a costing for natural dyes plus the dyeing process could be calculated.

Dye calculations are normally made on percentage of dyestuff to fibre, yarn or fabric, so I needed to work with a known weight of dry felt and a known weight of cochineal. By increasing the amount of measured dyestuff in a sequence of individual vats, I planned to dye a set of samples to calculate a percentage weight of dye to weight of felt. Cutting a precise weight of thick felt has ‘pound of flesh’ Merchant of Venice connotations. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. In the end I cut a piece that was slightly too heavy and then sliced pieces off the side so that I was working with a 200 g weight. I cut this into four so I could work with 50 g samples.

All the felt was mordanted in alum and cream of tartar. I used 12% alum and 8% cream of tartar – although I normally use less. The wool smelled so strongly of lanolin that I wasn’t sure if it had been sufficiently scoured for dyeing, so I erred on the side of a stronger mordant.

Because working with very small weights of ground cochineal is extremely fiddly I made a stock solution.

Weighing the cochineal
Preparing to grind the cochineal
Cochineal being decocted in boiling water
After several decocrions, there is little colour remaining
Pouring all decoctions into one solution
Cochineal is almost exhausted
Checking the colour
Three graded samples of dyed felt

I used Lanzarote cochineal for The Woolly Shepherd project. Some time ago I undertook quality tests for the  Asociación Milana, found their cochineal to be excellent and I continue to use it.

I ground 50 g dried cochineal to fine powder and tied it firmly  into a silk gauze bag. This helped prevent cochineal fragments entering the dye and avoided the need to strain the dyestuff. The bag was put into a stainless steel vessel with about 500 ml water and heated to simmer point (80C) for about 10 minutes. The decocted liquor was decanted into a container. Repeats of this process followed until there was hardly any colour coming out of the bag. The series of decoctions made up a stock solution of 50 g cochineal in 4 litres of water.

I calculated that I could draw off the equivalent of 1 g cochineal in each 80 ml of water  – if I kept the solution swirling while decanting so that it would be well-mixed.

The dyeing was fairly straightforward although I had an initial panic with the first sample: it appeared that the dye was not ‘taking’. Was the wool too greasy? But after the first half hour I saw the felt begin to turn pink. I slowly raised the temperature to 80C and held it for an hour, then allowed it to cool and sit overnight before rinsing. The colour was nearly exhausted in the vat after the long soak. I prepared three samples starting with a 4% proportion of dye to fibre and then increasing the percentage. With the felt being grey, the dye was always having to work against the base colour and in the end the percentage of dyestuff required for the dark pink was higher than I anticipated.

In a spirit of pessimistic self-knowledge I noted precise quantities, weights, times and individual calculations in my dye notebook. If my actual calculations were later found to be faulty (not uncommon with my maths), I could still make sense of the dyed samples because the maths could be reworked.

When undertaking my research into orchil I’ve studied historical dye notebooks, invoices, orders and the occasional sniffy nineteenth century letter of complaint. A high standard of colour accuracy was expected of past dyemakers by their clients. My exercise with cochineal gave me a small insight into how consistent results, competitive purchase and selling prices were achieved, using natural materials which can vary in quality.

Then as now, good results would depend on careful note-taking, accurate calculations, rigorously consistent dyeing and efficient retention of standard dyed samples.

The Woolly Shepherd: http://www.woollyshepherd.co.uk/

Asociación Milana http://www.tinamala.com

A version of this article was first published in the Journal for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, Issue 242, Summer 2012, pp 24 – 25


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New toys, no time to play

Last week I took one of my regular looks at Jenny Dean’s website Wild Colour. Jenny is an authority on natural dyes and author of several practical books on the subject.  I respect her work and long experience and her website invariably includes something new and interesting.  Her book Wild Colour was reprinted by Mitchell Beazley in 2010 with updates and revisions – and I wouldn’t be without it.

Jenny’s entry for January 8th 2013 was about a set of natural dye extracts in liquid form. They are called Aquarelle, they are from Botanical Colors and certified compliant with the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS). Jenny’s images show colours on wool yarn and silk fabric; some are mordanted and some are not. The colours look very good, especially on the wool, although the silk looks paler.

Twitter was then tweeted to see if any dyehards had experience of Aquarelle. Positive input arrived from several people including  Jane Deane  (no relation to Jenny and note the different spelling!) who tested the dyes last year. Jane probably told me all about them then, but I’m afraid I had forgotten.

I have used raw dyestuffs or powder extracts, but never a liquid extract which might suit my work better so I ordered a set of dyes which arrived yesterday. There is only one stockist in the UK, as far as I know, and that is D.T Crafts who import the dyes from the States. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to try them out at the moment, so I took a photo instead.

Four Aquarelle dyes
Natural dyes on georgette; wax resist
Natural dyes on georgette; wax resist

A satisfying way of combining natural dyes with wax resist continues to be a challenge for me.  I am at my most confident when designs originate in a drawing or sketchbook study and gradually evolve into an image, a texture or an arrangement of shapes, defined by wax as a resist. The original drawing drives me onwards through several incarnations of an idea, although I occasionally fizzle out, exhausted or bored when something doesn’t merit further exploration.  Synthetic dyes are my medium for this type of work; they are painted on in layers alternating with the wax, and then steamed. They go where they are put, they stay there, the overdyes are predictable and they don’t change colour. It’s not at all like that with natural dyes, which, of course, is part of their allure.

Natural dyes normally require heat, and heat melts the wax, so there is an instant difficulty with the natural dye / wax technique. Each separate dye requires individual handling and the colour may not turn out the same as the last time you used it. One dye can affect another, unexpectedly altering a colour or tone and overdyes aren’t always predictable. The timing of the indigo layer is crucial, as is mordanting. I have achieved a few pieces that I am happy with and these can be seen in the gallery section, and above. The central piece suffered from too much alkali in the indigo vat and the silk went harsh. That’s yet another problem with the technique.

I will certainly be posting on the results of work with Aquarelle when I  have time to try them out.


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Mud on the dog, blood on the ropes

The mud? Our snowflake melted, the moor is waterlogged, ditches and streams are overflowing, and although water is trying to flow downhill, it has to queue up and wait its turn. Water has nowhere left to go. The dog ploughs happily through it all, acquiring an abstract expressionist look to her fur. The final dog walk event nearing home must be in the ditch we call the Dog Wash.

Damp in the Devon air oozes into cob, thatch, wood  and stone. I am a church bell ringer and it also oozes into the bell ropes if they are not kept dry between ringing sessions. We have an extraordinary system to keep our ropes dry in the main tower – ropes are held within a large tube and a piano heater placed inside. But we ring in other places where there is no heat available.  Damp ropes become hard and tight and they also shorten in length. It makes them particularly hard to ring and is wicked on the hands, often resulting in blisters and friction burns – hence occasional drawn blood.  We had a long practice session on Saturday and I scored a four-plaster pair of hands this morning. Later, during the day’s ritual dog-mudding, I wondered what fibre is used for bell ropes.

These two quotes are from the website of Mendip Ropemakers Ltd

Flax has become the most widely used natural fibre for Church bell ropes. Flax is widely available at a reasonable price but the quality can vary depending on a wet or dry harvest. Flax is hard wearing and soft to handle. It is liable to absorb moisture and stiffens in damp or humid conditions. Longer ropes can change in length as a result of wet & dry weather.

Hemp is the traditional material for bell ropes. It is a superior quality of natural fibre rope, giving greater strength and abrasion qualities. Hemp is not as readily available as flax and is therefore more expensive. Hemp rope may seem a little hard on the hands initially, but softens with use. Hemp is also liable to absorb moisture and stiffens in damp or humid conditions. Longer ropes can change in length as a result of wet & dry weather.

The team prepares to ring for a wedding. They are holding the sallies
A bride arrives in the tower
The other side of the wedding
The bell mechanism
View from our church tower

There are several companies that make ropes, among them Ellis Bell Ropes in Leicestershire whose site shows how the sallies are made, by inserting coloured wool into the rope. The sallies are the tufted lengths which ringers grip while ringing; you can see some of them in the images above. They are often striped, which makes it easier to see them whizz up and down in dark bell towers.

Man-made fibres are also used: I saw references to pre-stretched polyester and something called Dyneema which is a ‘polyethylene core shrouded with a polyester sheave’. You can also buy combination ropes, where the bottom of the rope is flax and the top of man-made fibre.

Why do I ring? I enjoy being part of a team following an ancient tradition. I love old churches, and ringing in different places gives me the opportunity to climb towers. And, crusty old cynic that I am, I enjoy the ceremony, celebration and hope signified by a wedding and the theatrical moment when a peal of bells announces the emergence of the newly-married couple into the daylight. In our small town, there is normally a large crowd waiting.