Tag Archives: E Cinerea

February 16, 2014 · 8:16 pm

Travel Knitting

I have been travelling for work… and then my oldest friend invited me to his birthday… so I have been extending my carbon footprint by going to Perth for work, then to my friend’s birthday on my way home (for those who don’t know, Sydney is not on the way home to Adelaide, when you start out in Perth).

Anyway… in the hurry to leave home I managed to remember to pack travel knitting.  I started out with a sock in progress.  Eucalyptus dyed patonyle, destined for the feet of my Blue Mountains friends.  The weather where they live calls for handknit socks.

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These colours are the result of overdyes, where I didn’t like the initial colour and decided to try again.  By the time I left for Perth, I had one sock knit and another underway and caused quite a bit of fascination among the project team by knitting in breaks and grafting a toe over lunch.

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I had overdyed the rest of my patonyle more recently.  It started out dyed with black beans (not as colourfast as I’d like) and plum pine (not at all colourfast).

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These yarns went into my first attempt at the Michel Garcia organic indigo vat.  I had reservations about my vat as I went… the Ph test strips I had bought turned out not to measure the part of the Ph spectrum I needed and in the end I ran out of time and should have left the vat to the next day.  On the up side, the preparation of the vat all made sense and most of it went really well.   I think my judgment about it was basically right, I just didn’t go with my judgment as I should have done.  My friend dyed a doily:

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I re-dyed the sock yarn, originally bought second hand at a garage sale.

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Although I was happy with the finished colours, it turned out that I had hurried the indigo too much and I was left with crocking… the blue rubbed of on my hands a lot as I was knitting in Perth.  This made it certain the finished socks would leave the wearer with blue feet and I finally decided to abandon them after a few centimetres, frogged and left the yarn in a bin in Perth.  Sigh!  That must be the fiirst dyeing fail I have pronounced irretrievable.

I had an alternative plan.  I pulled out yarn I intended for a hat and chose one of the two patterns in my bag, Jared Flood’s Turn a Square.  I wound the ball in my motel room and cast on. Here it is as I wait for the taxi to the airport in Perth.

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The time difference between Western Australia (Perth) and the rest of the country is considerable, so even though the flight was four and a half hours, I left Perth at 10 am and arrived in Sydney at 5 pm, and here is the hat in the Sydney airport:

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Here it is in Sydney about to depart for Adelaide next day…

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I finished it on the way and started a second hat with the rest of the skein, top down. I’d call that a productive trip on many fronts!

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February 14, 2014 · 11:20 pm

Holiday spinning

We had a fabulous holiday at Port Willunga.  In spite of the warm weather, I did a lot of spinning. I have three fat bobbins of naturally dyed wool waiting for plying and I three-plied this rather lovely wool and silk blend by Wren and Ollie, a relatively new local business.

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Here is the resulting yarn.

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It came with a tiny lucky dip batt. I spun it up finely and three ply was the theme of the moment. I could’t resist using the photo opportunities of the lovely beach shack we were staying in. The low turret on the front right seems to be an acorn cap, for those wondering about scale.

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Finally, I had several small batts of alpaca that began in natural shades of grey which I then dyed with eucalyptus, leavng the deepest grey in its natural state.  I turned them into a gradient yarn.

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One final photo just for fun…

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January 23, 2014 · 11:30 am

A Community Celebration

As I read The Little Book of Craftivism, ideas kept popping into my head.  This one took a little longer to execute than the mini banners. There is a row of immense, sugar gums (Eucalyptus Cladocalyx) over 100 year old in our neighbourhood which were scheduled to be cut down due to changes in the railway corridor.  Many people in our neighbourhood were part of a campaign to save them.

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We managed to save these trees (albeit very severely pruned) while dozens of others were cut down.  People have been saying to me when they visit the nearby local neighbourhood centre how awful it looks now that all the trees that used to stand between the neighbourhood centre and the railway have been cut down.  They often say how relieved they are that the ones we saved are still there–but they do not realise what went into saving them.  They don’t even know those trees were threatened.  There are still all night works and daytime works and continuing campaigns and about noise going on and many people in the area feel very discouraged living with the aftermath of all the infrastructure works.  So I imagined bunting that read ‘these trees saved by community action’ and a bit of a celebration of our having actually succeeded in this part of what we have tried to do.

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Well, I made the bunting.  And another member of our local group emailed out the most beautiful invitation to come and hang it up and celebrate the continued existence of the sugar gums.  And so a small local celebration, complete with our local MP Steph Key and our local councillor, Jennie Boisvert, who both put considerable effort into supporting our campaign.  I wanted to thank the woman who stared the campaign and was its mainstay, so I made her a little leafy bag.  Here it is filled with rolled up bunting ready to go and celebrate.

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And here we are, after a highly entertaining hanging of the bunting.

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I’ve made a tutorial on how to create this kind of lettered bunting, which you can find in the how-to page (link at the top of the blog) or here, if you’d like to try your own.  I already have another plan, personally….

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January 17, 2014 · 9:52 am

For the love of mending

My favourite bag has already been mended rather extensively, as some may remember. But it was not to be expected that would be the last time. Not only that, but it had an encounter with a Moreton Bay Fig tree which dripped sap–or perhaps some other sticky substance–on it (the black splodge you can see below).  It was very hard to get that sap out of my hair, too, and let us not speak of my shorts… But sap was only a side detail in a glorious solstice celebration my friends organised, complete with one in a series of phenomenal home made papier mache pinatas.

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I had a few cuffs and collars from recent dye pots. They are much redder and blacker than the pieces which made the bag up until now.

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Cuffs and collars often come out best of all.  Proximity to iron? Three layers give better mordant absorption and/or better capacity to get a good contact print?  All that random interfacing? Tick–all of the above? I’m not sure, but it has always been this way for me.  Anyway… it began with a hand sewn patch at the solstice event, just so the bag could travel to Melbourne next day without suffering major trauma.  Then I ripped out the lining and went for it in all the necessary places.

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While I was on the job and pondering the unexpected benefits of interfacing, I raided my stash of intefacing of yesteryear–who knows where I inherited this pre-iron-on interfacing from? I have beena  receiving point for other people’s haberdashery for years now!  I interfaced the opening, which has worked out well in spite of my general suspicion of interfacing and the synthetics out of which most of it is made. And here is the resulting bag on a beachside bench.

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I know I’ve heard the philosophical debate over whether a boat whose every plank has been replaced is still the same boat. If I’d been the philosopher in question I would have had to ask about a patched pair of jeans–the place my love of mending really took root and my skills with a sewing machine seriously began to develop–or perhaps, a bag of patches.

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January 12, 2014 · 4:59 pm

Tree loving craftivism

While I was in Melbourne, I found Sarah Corbett’s A Little Book of Craftivism.  Yes, it is literally small, but inspiring out of proportion to its size.  It is about the work of the craftivist collective, together with proposals about how the reader might engage in their own craftivism.

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For those who might be wondering… one definition of craftivism: ‘Craftivism is a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite.’ More at the link.

I loved this little book from the beginning. This is activism of a gentle, slow kind.  It isn’t the only kind of activism the world needs.  But every social movement needs a variety of approaches–I’ve participated in many–and gentle is one of them.  This book is packed with organising wisdom, clear instruction, pictures that inspire and make you wish you had been there and examples of projects from the small to the enormous that offer plenty of scope for DIY.

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For a view of the book and its content, click here.  For a brief review with links to multiple other reviews and ways to purchase online other than through amazon, click here.  To purchase from the craftvist collective itself, click here and check the sidebar.

Did I mention finding this book inspiring?  I think it’s one of the highest compliments that you could pay to a book of its kind to say that I immediately wanted to go out and make some of the projects in this book and could immediately see places that could happen to good effect. Not only that, I tried my ideas out on my nearest and dearest and then created them.  My ‘mini protest banner’ is a little different to the cross stitched versions in the book–but nevertheless the same concept.

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I took:

  • a calico sack from a local business for my banner background (I offered to take the offcast bags from a shop and they accepted)
  • some not-so-glorious leaf print experiments for backing
  • some leaf-printed collars and cuffs for my frame
  • some eucalyptus dyed silk thead and
  • some secondhand bias binding… and…

Before long I had made two banners.  We hung the first one today. One of my friends offered the view that every day was a good day for this kind of event (I guess we’re friends in part because we agree on things like that!) so we had cool drinks of water and cherries and chat and then went out to admire the tree and tie on.  The 6 year old present wants to make more banners, which is additionally promising.

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This banner celebrates a river red gum (E Camaldulensis) that we managed to save from being cut down last year, with help from other local people and our local MP, Steph Key.  It has a legally mandated 3 m exclusion zone around it to protect the root zone, but this is not being observed very well lately and I want the people responsible to know that we care.  I had to measure the tree to be sure I had stitched on enough tape:  3.6 m (11′ 9”) around the trunk, well above the ground.  To give you a sense of its size… and the relative size of the banner (which is in the picture), I give you the full view.

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January 10, 2014 · 9:15 am

Bark dyes on alpaca and wool yarn

Here it is… some of my holiday knitting, ready to go!

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Last year I ran some workshops at the Guild, and I ended up with quite a quantity of Bendigo Woollen Mills Alpaca Rich in a shade of white called ‘rich magnolia’… which I was never going to use in this colourway.

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So… I have been skeining and dyeing it. Unevenly…

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More evenly…

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And in quite a range of shades.  The one right at the bottom in the picture below is handspun that had been mordanted with alum, dyed in logwood exhaust, suffered some kind of surprise bleaching episode in our laundry and then gone through two eucalyptus baths.  It looks great now, but what a soap opera of a story!

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And now… turned into balls and ready to be holiday knitting! Would you believe… slippers?

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January 8, 2014 · 9:27 am

Leaf printed t shirts

Last year, three t shirts from the op shop (thrift store) found their way into my soymilk bucket.  They have been sitting in a little pile since then, but recently they made their way into the dye pot. This one is for a treasured friend who has been waiting a while since I checked size with him.  The first picture (of the front) gets the colour about right and the second one (further below) is inexplicably different though taken within minutes!

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The leaves are from another friend’s Eucalyptus Cinerea.  It needs trimming to keep it out of the hair and eyes of passersby and I have generously offered to help!

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Yet another friend (perhaps I should ask my dear friends if they are happy to be named online!) visited on dyeing day so I gave her this next one and she designed its new leafy incarnation.  On the day I am writing I brought it in to work still bundled and tied with string, and she opened it on her office desk over lunch.  We experimented with putting these garments in a dyebath, rather than just into a simmering pot of water, and that is the reason for the overall orange that is strongest up near the neckline on the back where the fabric absorbed the dyebath most strongly.

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I think her design is lovely…

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The third t-shirt was a pale grey one.  I bundled it up in the morning and gifted it, cooked, but still rolled and tied, to a friend who is completely enchanted by the eco-print process and who has been facing tough times lately.  I’m hoping unwrapping that bundle gladdened her heart in these challenging times. It sure gladdened my heart to have her visiting us.

While we’re talking t-shirts… I couldn’t help noticing that two of the three were made in Bangladesh, a mighty long way from Adelaide.  For anyone interested in viewing the global garment trade from the perspective of a single t-shirt (though not one of these leafy t-shirts!) Planet Money from US National Public Radio has made a series on the subject you might like to check out.

Hopefully that’s three op shop t-shirts that will now have much more exciting second lives, with much less travel involved!

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December 12, 2013 · 9:00 am

Eucalyptus Nicholii?

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.

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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:

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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:

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In the past, using trees I was entirely confident were E Nicholii (albeit small specimens) I have got something more like this:

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These are blocks from a quilt I have been working on…

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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.

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The marauders came past to check what was happening as I took a photo of the tree.

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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!

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December 9, 2013 · 10:31 am

Of leaves and linking opportunities

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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!

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December 2, 2013 · 5:23 pm

Alas, poor Malcolm the Corriedale

We had a glorious visit to our friends in the hills on the weekend. There were recently shorn alpacas.  In black…

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In white…

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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:

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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.

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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) …

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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…

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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!

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