There are some great yarn bombs going on in Christie Downs right now. I had a tip from a friend!
The snakes are extra good…
But they’re all pretty splendid, I reckon.
Evidently these yarn bombers have plans to yarn bomb the railway station, which could really use a little love… if you want to help out you’d be welcomed.
Filed under Knitting
‘Tis the season for bark collecting, again! I’ve been out on my trusty bike visiting all the E Scoparias I know and investigating others that might prove to be (or not to be) E Scoparia. I pull my bike over to pack bark into a bag, trampling on it to crush it and make space for more, and filling again before loading my panniers. Or, go to visit friends with my big bucket in hand and pick up whatever has fallen since my last visit. Or, head out for a run, leaving my rolled up bag under a tree and pick it up to fill on my cool-down walk on the way back. This E Scoparia, tucked in behind the foliage of a carob tree, is peeling lavishly.
At home, I stash the bark in a chook feed sack, offering more opportunities for trampling which let me stack a lot of bark into one bag and get it into a form that will go into the dyepot with minimal fuss.
This week, I found a new E Scoparia (at least, that was my hope). I collected a bag full of bark and it is now soaking so I can test whether I have that right, in consultation with the dyepot. A friend who appreciates natural dyeing lives in this street–so I’ll look forward to telling her if she has a great dye tree at the end of her street! Blackett St:
I also collected bark from this enormous specimen. Last year I collected a lot of bark from this tree and then found I had one bag of bark that gave brown and not red to orange as expected. I suspect that means this is not an E Scoparia. Checking it out again today it is bigger than any other tree I believe to be E Scoparia and it has many more fruits visible and clinging to the stem. My initial sense is that the bark smells different, too. The leaves give fantastic colour (at least they did before someone took a chainsaw to all the lower branches), but I am running a trial bark pot before the tree sheds the main part of its bark. It is soaking alongside the other one as I write. Laught Ave:
Next day, here are the dye baths, three hours in, presented in the same order as the trees from which the bark came. They look remarkably similar but smell quite different:
Here are the (still wet) yarns that came from those dyepots, in the same order again. Clearly, the second tree is not E Scoparia–or–for some reason its context means it doesn’t give the same colour.
As I have had great results from the leaves of that second tree, I pulled the bark out, put some fallen leaves in, and re-dyed the tan skein…!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures
This summer, I have been collecting dyer’s chamomile for the first time. I have some in the garden, gifted to me by a fellow Guild member who was keen to have some of my madder (this wish granted, needless to say)! It has white petals.
But recently I found some with vivid yellow petals in the parklands beside the river Torrens.
Our exercise class were astonished when I said I was planning to harvest while we were out on a DIY exercise session (our instructor was off doing the Busselton Ironman–she is our hero). They offered to shield me from passersby who might intervene. I think they underestimated how scared most people seem to be when they see someone doing something so inexplicable (to them)! I let them know I’d only be taking the dead flowers and we all relaxed again. The patch is so big I really want to go back with more time… and it is flowering so generously, I am sure I have weeks in which to organise a return visit.
Meanwhile, we’ve been harvesting at home, too.
I keep thinking I’ll make rhubarb leaf mordant, and then not getting round to it!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Neighbourhood pleasures
There has been quite a bit of tea cosy action around here…
This was the leftover from a yarn with felted leaves on it. As it turned out, there were only a couple left! I like the pennant effect… like a ship’s mast, or perhaps a circus tent. Then there is this corespun yarn, complete with silk and sparkle.
It went home after a film viewing at our house recently, to a happy new home.
Corespun but with the tips of the locks left to roam free… incredibly silly…
Oh… and there is this natural grey single with leftover silk thread from a friend’s handspinning and card weaving… and mohair and sari silk thread and suchlike…
… and there are a few others from previous tea cosy jags lying about too…
Remember this bundle of leaves and my excitement about finally meeting E Nicholii, fully grown? The straight, narrow leaves below were supposed to be E Nicholii.
Well. E Nicholii is a well- and long-recognised dye eucalypt, described by Jean Carman and the Victorian Handspinners and Weavers Guild in their classic books, and prized by dyers I have spoken to who were using it in the 1970s and 1980s to obtain reds and oranges. So I was rather surprised to find this result from the best of several attempts:
I did get a roughly orange smudge on some of my fabrics from the ‘E Nicholii’. In the same pot, cooked for the same length of time and on fabric mordanted in the same batch, E Cinerea produced vibrant colour:
In the past, using trees I was entirely confident were E Nicholii (albeit small specimens) I have got something more like this:
These are blocks from a quilt I have been working on…
My own E Nicholii is a tiny specimen, surrounded by a personalised fence to prevent certain marauders with a tendency to dig up anything promising with no thought for the future.
The marauders came past to check what was happening as I took a photo of the tree.
How to explain this eco-printing result? I didn’t identify these trees myself but relied on someone else who was clearly knowledgeable, which is not to say any of us are above error. If I had identified them myself, I would say without hesitation that the dye pot is more reliable than my identification skills. But there are so many variables: these trees were mature while I have tried only young trees–all I have been able to find and identify with confidence. They were in relative shade and growing in a relatively cool spot… I just don’t know!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Leaf prints
I have been working on some slippers… with long breaks in between activity… for such a long time! They came of some polwarth fibre that was not promising enough for fine spinning and that I thought would be best rendered into felt. This is my go-to classic felting pattern, Bev Galeskas’ Fibertrends Clog pattern. If you’re a regular around here you know by now that I have made many dozens of them. I still think this pattern is genius… but I am a little bit over it just at present, personally. Anyway… some of these pairs had already suffered the indignity of being unsuccessfully dipped into indigo. Time to try again! I decided to pre-wet for evenness for once in my life.
Finally, the time came for unnatural dyeing. I have two burners, and four pairs of slippers. They’re big! I decided to exhaust the dye and re-use the water on the second round of dyeing, which worked well. It seemed a perfect opportunity to try this strategy out–after all, I am dyeing over chocolate brown wool for the most part. Fine details of colour are not of real moment.
Finally, I give you purple over brown, green over brown, red-brown-black (using up the leftovers of dyeing adventures past) and blue over brown.
Sadly I’ll not be able to hand them over in person but I can’t bear to make my friends wait any longer! We have had unseasonably cold weather here of late, and credibility on the question of whether they will ever see these slippers must be stretched to a very fine thread already! So I am going to give them to a mutual friend who I am hoping will be happy to drop them in to warm chilly toes at the next opportunity.
It was a weekend of leaf printing… and more about that later, since there were some expected outcomes as well as some surprises! But meanwhile… India Flint, whose techniques I am trying to use to create these prints (though as they say in the classics, all failures are my own work), has a brilliant blog. It is just as interesting and informative as on previous occasions when I’ve linked to it, but currently India is inviting people to post what they would like her to write about. So, should you wish to take up this opportunity, click here and contribute to the conversation!
Filed under Eucalypts, Leaf prints
We had a glorious visit to our friends in the hills on the weekend. There were recently shorn alpacas. In black…
In white…
And in cinnamon. But like the sheep, the brown alpacas were too shy for photos. There was a woodlot of blackwood trees, and some stumps with very impressive fungi growing on them:
There was a wealth of eucalypts and a knowledgeable community member who knew what many of them were. I brought home E Nicholii leaves (I have not had the chance to greet a fully grown specimen before, let alone a row of them), E Cinerea leaves and some massive juvenile E Globulus leaves.
There was fine company, cake and scones and home grown cherries. Not only that, but koala sightings and visits with rescue joeys (baby kangaroos whose mothers have been killed on the road, being raised by hand with tender loving care). Such awesomeness! I took lots of handspun yarn and left quite a bit behind where creative minds were whirling with plans and fingers were itching to get knitting… but there was bad news too. I got to meet with the people who hand raised the corriedale whose fleece I have been working with most recently, from a lamb. And sadly, poor Malcolm had recently and unexpectedly died, just before the shearer was due to visit. We paused on Malcolm’s grave. So it was special to have taken yarns made from Malcolm’s fleece to share… and I still have some, plus fleece that I dyed with eucalypts last week (it is E Scoparia bark peeling season) …
And fleece that is prepared and ready to spin, from my recent coreopsis–osage orange–indigo dyeing season. So… although I never did get to meet Malcolm, it’s conceivable I’ve spent more hours with my hands in his fleece than anyone…
And I now have 5 alpaca fleeces and one from Lentil the sheep to think about and share around, such is the generosity of our friends!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Fibre preparation, Natural dyeing, Spinning
I have had a shirt in progress for a few weeks, and recently it reached completion.
I bought this handwoven cotton at Beautiful Silks in Melbourne some time ago. It takes quite some skill to go into that treasure trove of beauty and colour and come out with something so plain (and not made of silk), but apparently that is one of my superpowers. I didn’t have quite enough for all the pattern pieces, so used some scraps from my skirt for the inside cuffs. I have made this shirt in order to have more than one top that works with the skirt, so I think this is a great feature, rather than a flaw.
The pattern is Vogue 2592, purchased many years ago. I worked back through my records, such as they are, and found I first made it in red linen (it turned out to be stretch linen–which I did not appreciate in the shop at the time)–in 2004. I am still wearing that shirt with just one hand mend where the lower edge of the button band had come adrift. Turns out I am still wearing shirts I made as far back as 2002, though some have worn through or gone to other owners in that period .
The buttons came into my stash from the op shop.
Not only had they been saved from a shirt that has presumably gone to become rag, but they had been lovingly stitched onto recycled card. I think the women who tend the Save the Children op shop on Goodwood Road must have been responsible for this thorough act of rescue. The craft supplies section of their shop is organised and priced by people who know what they are dealing with and who value recycling.
I appreciate their efforts. I didn’t have enough of these buttons for the cuffs, but it’s likely no one will ever notice that the cuffs have round buttons unless one of us tells them…
I ran out of thread just about buttonholing time and so had an unexpected trip for more thread. In case anyone from southern Adelaide is reading (I know there are a few!)… only blocks from Spotlight Melrose Park (near Castle Plaza) and just off South Road is the independently owned Tricia’s Discount Fabrics.
In case you don’t know it and want to–Tricia has been running this shop a very long time. It no longer focuses on dancewear and knits (though there are neon and metallic look knits and chiffon to be had). Instead she caters to quilters as a priority, though there are plenty of other fabrics too. She has a gigantic range, far bigger than Spotlight or Lincraft (these are our ‘big box’ stores, if you’re reading in North America). She’s in an old industrial building, one of several she has occupied over the years, with a suitably glamourous entry:
She also has a huge range of notions and quilting gear, quilting books and thread. She rivals any quilting shop I’ve been into in our city for range but without associated glamour. And she gave no glimmer of a frown when I just purchased my reel of thread. She is knowledgeable and I live in hope her conditions of work and pay are a whole lot better than those notorious at Spotlight. I guarantee the queue is a lot shorter!
Filed under Sewing
I have been using up smaller scraps of indigo dyed fabric. I decided on lined drawstring bags. The kind I like to use when carrying small knitting projects around. The linings allow the use of all kinds of little scraps.
These outers use some of the hemp I dyed with indigofera australis as well as the last of my wax resist indigo dyed fabric, and some with a delectable Australian designed print.
Here is the other side:
And here they are with cords drawn through their casings:
I also made some larger bags with small pieces of leaf printed recycled linen and another Australian print.
Surely this is the last of the famous brown ramie shirt and those hemp jeans! And I have found use for some pre-loved cord as well.
Filed under Eucalypts, Leaf prints, Sewing
Local & Bespoke 