Eileen Hallman
New World Textiles
PO Box 1484
Black Mountain, NC 28711-1484
828/669-1870
 

I have been obsessed with cotton since the early 1980s when I learned to spin my home grown colored cotton on a great wheel.  I graduated quickly to the charkha. While I do spin and weave with other fibers, the organic cottons are my passion.   I am involved in research on organic, naturally pigmented, and recycled cottons and in the development of spinning slivers and yarns from these cottons. I am not committed to 100% cotton products; I also blend these cottons with other natural fibers to provide cotton spinners with a wide selection of cotton-rich fibers to choose from.

As an engineer, my background surfaces in my development of tools and techniques; as a weaver, I realized that the charkha spindle was small enough to fit into a shuttle, and if such a thing existed, I could eliminate several steps in the production of cloth. In 1996 I introduced the Khadi Khanoo spindle shuttle so that I could go directly to the loom with my handspun.

Additionally, because I also work with cotton sliver that is colored, I eliminated even more steps between yarn production and patterned cloth production. I began spinning in a color sequence to obtain weft stripes. From there, I added warp stripes using commercial yarns to come up with a single shuttle plaid. The shuttle and the color sequence in the weft combine to simplify the weaving of plaids or weft stripes.

Along the way, I also realized that there is little to no usage of singles in the handweaving world. I began exploring the use and manipulation of yarn energy; any singles yarn has energy, but the amount of twist is very important. I find the hand of a fabric woven with singles is much softer and responsive to the touch than a cloth made with balanced yarns.

In experiments with energy and weave structure, I developed a method to shape cloth on the loom. I call the technique "Crepe & Shape".

There is a dual fascination with both the color play and the dynamics of the cloth made with singles yarns.  The possibilities for live texture are endless, and I expect to be exploring them for a long time.

  Company Chronology
(Brief overview... not intended to list every product I ever offered, when it was introduced and when it was discontinued. Almost all of the blends of organic cotton, natural and colored, with silk, wool, hemp, reclaimed denim, lyocell, & baby alpaca were developed and provided by me.)
1995 introduced "Blue Sky", a blend of reclaimed denim and organic cotton sliver to handspinners
1996 introduced "Khadi Khanoo" shuttle to hold the charkha spindle
1997 introduced Tencel and cottonized flax to spinners and weavers
1998 introduced Crepe & Shape concept; ensemble in fashion show at Convergence
2003 Spinning Cotton on the Charkha instructional DVD
2004 imported and introduced Peruvian cotton sliver to handspinners
2011 introduced EZ Dye cotton to handspinners and handweavers

Articles
Arm's Length Spinning, or Single Shuttle Plaid, Spin-Off Fall '96
Spinning Crepe Yarns, SS&D Summer '97
The Carolina Flax Project, SS&D Fall '97
Spinning for a Single Shuttle Plaid, SS&D Winter '98
The Whole Truth about Sett, Weaver's, Spring '98
Lyocell , Weaver's , Fall '98
Crepe & Shape, Spin-Off Fall '99 (see correction to 8-shaft draft/warp-wise channels)
The Stecoah Weavers Project, Fiber Ethics, Winter 2000
Huck Goes Green Web Project, Handwoven, Jan/Feb 2007
Spinning Cotton on the Charkha in the U.S., Jagriti, Vol. 52, No. 10, September 2008
EZ Dye Cotton, Handwoven, Mar/Apr 2012

Monographs
Algebraic Expressions in Design

DVD
Spinning Cotton on the Charkha