Dreaming Spirals

At last - we have photos!

This was dyed with blackberry leaves and a copper mordant.

This one was mordanted with alum and was dyed in the exhaust of the blackberry leaf dyebath.

This was dyed with an unknown hanging plant which I pulled up from the garden last summer and has been soaking all winter outside in water.

It didn’t get much colour, but it is a nice creamy shade.  There is definite colour when I put it next to the original.  It also was mordanted with alum. 

This next one had a bit of a chequered life because I mordanted it with alum and then dyed it in a forsythia dyebath which was almost completely useless.  I also added a pinch of iron for the last 15 minutes, but that didn’t improve it.  So I chucked some madder roots which I had been soaking into a sort of large herb sphere that I have (actually I think it is for steaming vegetables but it looks more like those things you can buy for infusing herb tea except bigger.   Except that some of the bits of madder root were too small and came out of the holes on to the yarn and the next day I got the whole lot out, put the madder into a muslin bag, rinsed the yarn, which now had patches of red on it but not entirely, and put it back into the madder bath.  You’re not supposed to heat the madder to more than about 50C so I just heated it up and then left it overnight.  I added another skein of yarn to get the exhaust. 

And here is the skein that was added later:

Here they all are together:

I’ve still got some yarn mordanted with copper and some more which is unmordanted yet so watch this space!  I’ve sent off for an indigo kit so I’m going to try that next…

This is the Kool Aid dyed yarn:

I put it in a microwave dish and poured the colours on as if I was space dyeing then heated it. 

For this next one I did the same but they seem to have more or less all gone into one or two shades…

And I overdyed some felt which I made about a year ago:

It was mostly to tone down the brilliant white colour of the back:

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Golly, I can’t believe it has been a week since I have posted. That is what happens when you have a photo-heavy blog and no camera! I was just about to borrow my old one from DS2 and I got a letter from Jessops saying my camera is waiting at the shop!! Hurray, hurray! I’m going down town tomorrow to the farmers’ market so I’ll call in at Jessops as well. So hopefully there will soon be a pictorial record of my natural dyeing.

One thing I noticed about the yarn I dyed with the natural dyes is that they smell of them! I just typed that and thought “hmm, maybe it’s the woolwash liquid I used” so I put down my laptop and nipped into the kitchen to have a smell…. But no, it isn’t. The blackberry leaf-dyed yarn definitely smells vaguely of blackberries and I don’t know what madder smells like but that yarn has its own distinctive smell as well. Meanwhile the KoolAid dyed yarns definitely have a KoolAid pong about them!!!

Maybe it is the lack of a camera or maybe it is that spring is in the air, but I’ve definitely got more done this week. I put together a list of meals and went through the freezer (with gloves on) writing down everything in there. (Had black fingers at the end of it where the dye from the gloves stained them… hmmm… ). And I just did a ginormous Sainsburys order so we’re kitted out for a siege now. I have also sorted out DS1’s work experience for July (he is going to Stagecoach, the bus company), gone to a meeting about his geography field trip to Sorrento also in July (looking at the itinerary I want to go too!!! though maybe not with a group of teenagers…) and spoken to his head of year about a problem he is having at school. And let DS3 start walking home from school on his own - a big adventure and since he starts secondary school in September, useful practice in independence! And it also means I don’t have to stop what I’m doing at 3.15 pm to go and get him…

Still haven’t done any quilting. Maybe all this activity is prevarication. I have started to make a wall-tidy with pockets as a sample for HHI. Ron is going to Zambia in a couple of weeks so that needs to be finished before then.

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Well, the skeins dyed so far look gorgeous - totally different to the colours you get with chemical dyes. The blackberry leaves came out a mid brown colour with the wool mordanted with copper and a gorgeous golden yellow in the exhaust bath with a skein mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. The skein dyed with some unidentified plant which has been soaking over winter in a black bin outside came out a sort of browny cream colour. Okay but not very exciting. This morning I cooked up some forsythia leaves which Jill Goodwin says ought to come out a nice green colour (A Dyer’s Manual). Though she reckoned the brown skein above ought to have been blue green and the alum skein pink so I don’t know what to believe! I will dye some wool with it tomorrow anyway.

I also had a busy afternoon dyeing with some Kool Aid which someone sent me in a swap ages ago. I did it in the microwave following these instructions. They were pretty effective too, but I don’t much like the sickly smell, which refused to go away despite about 5 rinsings… After seeing the natural dyed yarn I really don’t like the look of these chemical dyes very much - goodness knows what it does to kids’ stomachs!

So the washing line is pretty full at the moment!

If my camera doesn’t arrive soon I’ll dig out my old one, which now belongs to DS2, and take some photos with it…

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Well, I’ve been quiet but not inactive.  Still no camera but I’ve dug a few out of Picasa which I haven’t put on my blog yet….

The weather is absolutely glorious.    The garden is lovely.  We have two red tulips which I thought I’d killed off by planting my herb garden where they were, but they seem to have come up this year, the first time for three years.    Here’s a photo of them in previous years:

I bought a couple of blueberry plants in the last two farmers’ markets in town (one at a time, all I could carry up the hill to my house!).  Here is one of them waiting on the patio to be planted out.    Our soil is very acid and apparently they like acid soils so they should do well.

Because the weather has been warm, I have been doing some natural dyeing (or at least preparing for it) over the last couple of days, so I could boil stuff up while leaving the kitchen door open.

I bought this gorgeous pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms via a yarn coop I am in.  I want to dye it and then knit it into a bag and felt it. 

Here it is wound into skeins ready for dyeing.  Yesterday I washed it and mordanted some in alum and some in copper and picked a lot (A LOT!!) of blackberry brambles which were running wild in our front garden.  I was attacked in the forehead by a rampaging yukka plant and have lots of scratches to show for the battles with the brambles but now they have been safely boiled up and I am just waiting for the water to cool sufficiently to put one of the skeins in.  I’ve got some madder to dye some more skeins … photos when Nikon duly releases my camera!  Hopefully…. 

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No photos yet, I’m afraid - my camera is still away being repaired…

We were away in Minehead at a church weekend over Easter and the weather was glorious!  On Monday I went walking along a bit of the South West Coastal Path and wished my camera was with me.  About a mile out of Minehead you get to the edge of the Exmoor National Park and walk through a forested area where I saw a pheasant and a wren… well, I heard the wren first, having listened to one in my garden a week or two ago and connected the voice with the bird!  So I knew what to look for when I heard its chirruping sound.  Here’s one on this BBC page if you want to listen!

Then I got out on to the moors along the coast - click the link to see a typical photo of the area.

There is a wonderful sculpture which marks the start of the path, which actually goes all round the south west coast, through Devon and Cornwall right around the ‘foot’  of Britain.  It is a massive pair of hands holding a map, made of steel.  There is a picture of it here .

We got back on Tuesday and yesterday I finally took away all the plastic and newspaper (not to mention bowls and buckets) protecting my studio from a potential attack of the elements (that’ll make it rain all through April and May no doubt!).    So now I have my design table back again.

The rust dyeing turned out well and I have another lot using up the rest of the rusty baking tray (just hope it doesn’t rust a hole through it or I’ll have to creep out and buy another one when DH isn’t looking!!).  I’ll have a queue of things to photograph by the time my camera returns.   We went to Blackwood today up in the valleys and I saw this amazing sculpture of hands and it was all rusty and I was itching to wrap some fabric round it.   (The photo in the link doesn’t show the little metal hands all joined together but I could just imagine what a wonderful piece of fabric I’d get from it!). 

It is also DS1’s fifteenth birthday so we went out to lunch to celebrate.  He had a powerful CD/radio/MP3 player and despite his bedroom being on the top floor, we can hear it down on the ground floor now!  Hmmm… teenagers.  DS2 will be a teenager at the beginning of May, although he has been practising for it for a while now.  The grunts and attitude….  

One fun thing I came back to was a Google alert for my name which showed me that BBC Wales had published my photo of the new bridge in Newport (click on number 4)!  Exciting…

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I finished my cashmere socks! 

While knitting, I listened to an awful lot of podcasts.  One of my favourites is Cast On by Brenda Dayne.  She is a Canadian living in Wales and she has a great couple of episodes which cover her visit to the National Wool Museum in Wales.  She did them several months ago now, but they are well worth listening to if you are interested at all in how wool is prepared and woven and the woollen industry in Wales. 

If you are tempted, they are in Episode 37 and Episode 38. 

I found them fun to listen to because one of the things I enjoy doing on holidays is visiting textile museums and I’ve been round woollen museums in France and read commentaries on them in French so it was nice to hear it in English for a change!   Ever since I set up the blog I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a clickable map with links to textile museums and I even have a category in my favourites folder where I add them whenever I find them.  One day maybe it will come to fruition…  I like the idea of being able to go to it whenever I’m going on holiday and just to look at the map and see if there is one nearby.  Please, if anyone has seen anything like this on the web, tell me before I do start one and spend hours preparing it!!!

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In the absence of my camera (sob!) I am raiding my photo albums to put a bit of colour into the blog…  It has been such nice weather here, it is a pity I can’t photograph it while it’s sunny!

A primrose in the garden…

The forsythia is in full bloom.  I noticed today while looking through the window you can see there, it was perfectly framed and gorgeous, yellow against a deep blue sky.

And before I forget, Hilary, this is the spider photo.  I think I need to crop it for the spiders though…..

This do you??!!  Sorry for anyone of a squeamish disposition…

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We went to the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea on Saturday. DS2 went on a rugby tour with the school to Brussels for the weekend so it was quiet! The museum is pretty new - it has only been open for a couple of years. The thing which I noticed first are some huge wallhangings which look as though they have been rust dyed with industrial machinery parts. It is nice to know that this method of dyeing is actually being used for commissioned art. So, of course, I wanted to take a photo of it. Problem! I turned my camera on and the screen was all black, apart from the computer information display. All the menus and everything were working fine but I couldn’t take a photo….

The man in Jessops reckoned the chip had come away from the lens so it has gone back to Nikon for repair… so the blog won’t have many photos for a while, unless I borrow my old camera from DS2.

That wasn’t the only thing which happened on Saturday. I also broke one of my wooden double ended sock needles … so I’m now finishing off the cashmere yarn socks using one metal needle and three wooden ones! Not a good day…

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