When you walk toward Lynne Vogel’s studio in Sewanee, you pass by a number of Dutch ovens, stock pots and buckets that look as if they’ve been set out to catch rain or debris. But what is actually happening in those containers is something a bit mysterious and very beautiful.
Vogel, a longtime hand-spinner of yarn and knitter extraordinaire, has moved to dying her wool using only native plants to achieve luminous colors that reflect the palette of this Mountain.
“I am intrigued by trying to evoke colors from objects in nature,” she said recently at her studio. From a suitcase filled with skeins of wool she pulls out one dyed to a rich, warm brown color, created by soaking the yarn in water steeped with black walnuts from her neighbor’s yard. She gently fingers a blue-gray skein dyed with elderberries and gathers skeins of a soft green dyed with Queen Anne’s Lace. Coreopsis flowers turned the water orange, but yielded apricot-colored wool that will become fingerless gloves or a fluffy scarf.
Together with Jan Quarles, Vogel will be displaying and selling her hand-dyed wools, knitting patterns and some knitted objects at the upcoming Sewanee Arts and Crafts Association’s (SACA) Fall Fair on Saturday, Oct. 12, in Shoup Park. Quarles, who has collaborated with Vogel for many years on spinning and knitting projects, is a professor of communication at MTSU but has spent her free time “spinning and playing with color since the 1970s.”
Vogel described her interest in dying with found objects. “This was a good summer for gathering things to dye,” she said, noting that the abundant rains meant fertile vegetation.
“All these are natural dyes on natural fibers,” Vogel said. After using synthetic dyes for most of her career, she is delighted to be using the plants and fibers she can find in her backyard.
At the crafts fair Quarles will showing her eco-dyed scarves and fabric that have been dyed by binding the flora directly to fabric, simmering together to transfer the color from the leaf to the fiber.
Vogel is well-known beyond the Mountain for her knitting patterns, often described as “elegant with an edge.” She said, “My designs are artful yet classic enough to cross fashion barriers.”
The hand-spinning Vogel has long practiced has influenced her pattern design. “Spiraling patterns especially intrigue me because the spiral is a symbol of the vortex of creation,” she said. “Every time I spin yarn I hold the tiny vortex of the point of twist between my fingertips. Hand spinning is all about the point of twist, how fibers are pulled into this vortex to become yarn.”
Vogel is the author of two books about knitting: “The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook” and “The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters.” Her knitting patterns can be found at <www.ravelry.com>.
—Reported by Laura Willis
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