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Mom and DY shearing:
Shi' ma, (my mother) still looks over my shoulder to see that I am doing a good job shearing. She teaches me the fine details of shearing; for example, "Always keep the sheep's feet away from you in case it starts kicking."
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| My father, Kee, sharpening the clippers with a file. |
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I raise only churro sheep. The black and white wool that I use in my rugs is the natural color of the fleece. A group picture of some of my prize churros. I keep them in the corral most of the time.
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| Here I am carefully clipping my prized black churro. I love the long and lustrous fleece of the churro sheep. The fleece often measures over 7" long and the longer the fleece the easier it is to spin. |
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| After washing and drying the fleece, the wool must be carded and spun. Here I am using hand carders to separate the fibers from each other, lying them parallel to form roving for spinning. |
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| Once the wool is carded, I spin the wool to use as weft. I use a Navajo hand spindle to achieve a fine and even thread. Spinning is the most important part of the weaving process. The quality of the Navajo rug depends on how well the wool is spun. |
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| Dyeing wool to achieve just the right intensity and color is an art in itself. I experiment with many native plants to produce colorful dyes to change the white wool into any number of brilliant and subtle colors ready for use in a new design. |
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We call this fungus, "mistletoe". It is a parasite that grows on juniper trees. I use it to get various shades of yellow dye.
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| My son, nieces and nephews often tag along to help me collect plants for dye. I teach them the names of the plants in both Navajo and English. The girls are picking chamizo stems and flowers near my home in Tselani. In Navajo we call the chamizo plant, diwozhiilbaih. |
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| I pick the ripe, prickly pear cactus fruit in September to make a rose or purple dye. |
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| Rabbit brush is a very common plant for dyers to use to attain an earthy yellow ochre. |
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A pot of fresh chamizo ready to be used to make yellow dye.
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| I collect many kinds of plants for dyeing. I often use walnuts to create a brown dye. As a young girl, I will always remember one of my visits to my nali (grandmother). She was collecting plants, and she told me that she uses them to make the colors that she uses in her rugs. I think that's when I first became interested in dyeing. She boiled water, put in snakeweed plant, and then added the wool, which she left for a long time. When she took the wool out, it was a beautiful yellow. |
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My color palette of natural dyes made out of black beans, walnuts, cedar bark, blood roots, onion skins, and cochineal (cactus insects).
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