Beautiful spring!
Thanks to taking a class with Shibori Girl I finally got an indigo vat going. Got to love indigo! While you have to set up and maintain the vat, once you have it going there's no mordanting, no heating. Just dip and dye. I tried a variety of fabrics and fibres along with some feathers and a wood bead. The green and gold rovings are onion skin dyed rovings over-dyed with indigo.
After winter, what can be sweeter than early spring flowers? Snowdrops, crocuses and primulas with winter-blooming heather.
Madder, which comes from the roots of several plants and trees, is one of the oldest dyes known. It can produce a number of different colours depending on the dyeing conditions. To produce a deep Turkey red it needs hard water and care that the temperature doesn't go above 160F.
My water is alkaline to begin with and I added a Tum's tablet to make it even more so. I watched the temperature but it did get up to around 180F. I still got a lovely deep Turkey red on the wool roving. The fabric is mainly silk with one cotton. The paler colours are from exhaust dyeings.
We mend so that something of value to us, whether it be a relationship or an object, can continue on and function. When I was little, when my grandmother visited us the first thing she did after greeting us was ask, "Where's my mending?" And of course my mother was only too happy to oblige! I grew up spoiled by this and haven't been much of a mender myself. My attitude, however, has changed greatly as I've journeyed along with Jude Hill.
I buy my clothes at the Thrift store and it's a challenge to find long-legged pants that I like. I wear them until they're translucent and showing the occasional hole. This pair of much worn and much appreciated pants will continue on with the help of a large patch.
It occurred to me that I may never have to buy a pair of pants again - I can just keep adding patches. As I started to wonder how I might appear over time I remembered something from my childhood.
In our neighbourhood was an elderly woman who wore patched clothes, an old coat, always carried bags and held long conversations with trees. We were afraid of her and called her Witch Hazel, something I now feel sad about. I suddenly thought of myself in my patched clothes, old coat, carrying bags of seaweed back to my garden, stopping to chat with my favourite trees. Ha!
I always like to have a project of 'mindless' knitting on the go - something I can knit while visiting with friends, waiting for appointments or riding the ferry. I find that short row scarves are ideal for this - easy but interesting enough so as not to be boring. My first short row scarves were knitted with hand-painted handspun wool using a pattern from issue 01 of Thr3fold. These are the most recent ones, tagged and ready for our Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild's Christmas sale this weekend.
Recently I knitted a helix scarf with handspun. This is another short row scarf that was featured in the Spring 2011 issue of Spin-off magazine. The one I knitted is a more ruffled variation sent out by Spinning Daily.
Some little bags that were fun to make for the Christmas table at our sale.
Our Spinners and Weavers Guild is having its yearly Christmas sale the middle of November so I'm busy spinning, knitting and felting. This scarf is knitted from handspun wool that was left over from other projects or never used. Lots of fun to knit! There's a little bell on each end tassel for sound effects.
It's Halloween party time and Abigail and Cornelius are SO excited! A Fanciful Twist is hosting a party and everyone's invited. Visit Vanessa's website and other participating bloggers to enjoy some Halloween spirit.
Bring out your books of Spells and Incantations. Dust off the bottles of Nightbane blossoms, spider gland extract and bat cave fungus and brew up some Magic.
The cats have their trick or treat bags all ready for catnip crunchies, tuna treats and mouse-flavoured munchies.
Tamarra pauses for a picture with her new broom before getting ready for take off.
Strange beings are out and about.
Everyone wishes you a very Happy Halloween!
As the warm sunny days of summer give way to the cool, rainy weather of autumn here on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, the mid-summer flowers begin to wind down. Now's the time to do the last dyeings with them and dye with the late summer and early fall flowers.
Slugs love marigolds. We have slugs. Many slugs. Giant slugs. If I plant marigolds in the garden beds the slugs quickly strip them down to the thick central stem. So after a deer jumped over the fence and ate the early spinach I'd planted in garbage pails I planted marigolds in this place where I could better protect them. They've been great for dyeing all summer.
The Rudbeckia are beautiful at the end of summer and well into the fall.
A steam bath of bundles of silk with marigolds and Rudbeckia, mordanted with alum and with some copper sulphate over part of the bundles. When I'm steaming something strong smelling like marigolds or that might be toxic I do it on a hot plate on the deck.
Now the hard part! At least with steaming I usually only let them sit overnight before I open them up.
The final result. The bliss of dyeing!
BaaBaa and Penelope (inseparable friends) inspect a small bag and a scarf knitted with handspun thick and thin wool. I'm having fun with this but still need more practice to get into a relaxed, steady rhythm of spinning.
Rovings and curly mohair dyed with man-made dyes. I'm a colour junkie and a compulsive dyer. I'm not the precise type but the let's-pour-things-together-and-see-what-happens kind. I find it more exciting but also more suspenseful. I'm not good with suspense. I'm the type who reads the latest Harry Potter in one sitting, propped up in bed, literally holding my eyelids open at 2 in the morning...
