Now that Christmas is over I can post pictures of some of the gifts I made for Christmas. Here are a couple of little flower faeries, all made with naturally dyed wool. I also made a Japanese indigo little being but forgot to take her picture.
And a little gnome.
An eco-dyed bag with cards inside.
And the eco-dyed cards.
I love making little bags out of leftovers. This little bag is knitted from wool that I painted with Gaywool dyes and then spun into a single. It's stuffed with dyed silk hankies.
A member of our Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild gave me bits and pieces of wool left over from carding and I spun them into a lumpy yarn. I stuffed it with some of the Nature treasures I store in the bathtub of a spare bathroom.
After a holiday away from needle felting I may be back in the mood. I had fun making these little balls last night.
I wanted a quick knitting project and I love making little bags. So I knitted this little bag from curly mohair dyed with natural dyes.
These are little bags I made as Christmas gifts for two friends and fellow dye pot stirrers. They're made completely out of plant dyed fabric and fibres. Even the wooden beads are dyed with Rooibos tea.
Going through my stash I came across some different coloured wool that I'd carded together so I spun it up and knitted a little Christmas bag.
This weekend three of us got together for a logwood dyeing party. I cooked up the logwood wood chips a couple of days previously, strained them the night before we dyed and took the liquid over to my friend's house. Before we put in the fibre we added a Tums which is supposed to help intensify the colour and the colour did immediately darken. The calcium in the Tums is a substitute for hard water which has this effect. Here are the results of our dyeing, fresh from the dye pot. The Shibori silk was done around the wooden bobbin.
Such a beautiful spring with fresh green leaves, primulas, marsh marigolds, early rhododendrons, heather, flowering shrubs and trees, spring bulbs and forget-me-nots. The air is scented with the fragrance of a shrub with tiny white flowers and on sunny days there's the loud buzzing of bumble bees. This silk that I dyed with natural materials last year seems to express this beautiful time so well.
I tore strips of silk, tied them together and knitted this Spring bag. It would make a lovely Easter bag as well.
I love making little bags out of bits of leftover handspun and scaps of cloth. This is my Summer Sunshine bag, knitted with handspun wool/kid mohair blend during the dark, rainy days of our West Coast winter.
A tooth fairy bag bought by one of our guild members for her granddaughter.
Another tooth fairy bag.
Tooth fairy bags and an amulet bag.
Little Christmas bags.
These bags are knitted with hand dyed, handspun wool. The blue one is a summer bag - the time when the sun is shining, the ocean is sparkling with light and the sky is brilliant blue. This is the time that gives our region its name. The greyish bag is for the other times of year when the sky is grey, the ocean is grey, the stones on the beach are grey. But when you look more closely you see a variety of subtle colours and the glisten of wet surfaces. Since this is the predominant weather for our region, clearly we are a glass-half-full people in calling this the Sunshine Coast!
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.
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.
I've started to practice spinning thick and thin singles. When I first started spinning thick and thin was no problem and spinning evenly was the challenging goal. Now it's the reverse! I spun up a small amount and then knit it into a rectangle just to see how it knit up. It was OK so I made it into a little bag - maybe a tree ornament or a tooth fairy bag for our guild's Christmas sale. For my second effort I spun some hand-painted rovings and then knitted them into a scarf.