Tag Archives: merino

October 12, 2014 · 4:47 pm

Ply time!

A while back I had used almost every bobbin I own, each with a different colour of thread on it.

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Over time there were even more bobbins of singles than this pictures shows…  finally there has been a season of plying, skeining and washing, and now I have this pile instead.

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Logwood purples, purple-greys and purple-browns, a cochineal pink (and a cochineal-logwood exhaust), three indigo blues, two madder exhaust-oranges, and a coreopsis exhaust yellow.  I didn’t take good enough notes of the fibres–some are on merino roving (the madder), some on polwarth, some on grey corriedale. Maybe there is a little of Malcolm the Corriedale in there too!

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And there has been even more bee swarm action in the neighbourhood.  These bees have taken up residence on a rainwater tank, with some support from a ladder! And… I am so over tending the silkworms 🙂

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August 23, 2014 · 12:07 pm

Dyes of antiquity: Carmine cochineal

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Cochineal is another of the dyes I received from the Guild and used at the workshop a while back.  In fact, there was a choice of cochineals.  In what I realise now was my ignorance, I chose ‘carmine cochineal’ because it was ground up and I was unsure how I could adequately grind the whole dried insects I also have.  As you can see, after an initial period of being dull ornage, the dye bath was an impressively shocking pink.  It turns out that ‘carmine cochineal’ is not a shade of cochineal but a preparation of cochineal boiled with ammonia or sodium carbonate.  I borrowed Frederick Gerber’s Cochineal and the Insect Dyes 1978 from, the Guild and found that the deeper red colour I had in mind when I saw the term ‘carmine’ could only be obtained from this preparation with the application of a tin mordant which I am not prepared to use.  the colours we achieved with alum were well within the range indicated by the included colour chart of wool samples (those were the days!)

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The colour range on this card (with madder beneath for comparison) is impressive even without tin. 

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We dyed organic wool. I dyed silk paj and twined string (the orange string was dyed with madder). 

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I brought the vat home with me and dyed a lot more fibre in an attempt to exhaust it.  Here is grey corriedale mordanted with alum and overdyed with carmine cochineal.

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And spun–three plied.  This is my first ever crocus flower, by the way!

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The magenta silk embroidery thread had maximum time in the bath, since I fished it out when removing the dyestuff (in its recycled stocking) prior to disposing of the bath!

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July 15, 2014 · 3:44 pm

Dyes of antiquity: Madder root

Three cheers for dried madder root!

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You may remember that I acquired some through the Guild.  I set out by pouring boiling water over it twice, and draining off the resulting liquid.  This is a strategy which is usually described as a good idea in order to help separate some of the brown and yellow pigments in the root from those which might produce red.  The resulting liquid was very dark brown.  I saved it for later experimentation.  I’ll get back to that!

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Every long term reader of this blog knows I can organise orange dye in a heartbeat, so I was hoping for red from madder.  When seen at the workshop I ran at the Guild, it was looking rather orange.

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However, time is needed.  And gentle heat.  This pot produced some light reds at the Guild. Once again, the cold processed alum, long steeped sample gave the most intense colour. Rhubarb (the two samples on the right hand side), not so much.

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I didn’t think it was done, however, so I took the whole dyebath home.  Happily, no mishaps en route.  Since then, I’ve been happily trying to exhaust this madder. I have overdyed grey corriedale. The fleece took up the dye differently in different parts of the locks (the weathered paler tips most of all).

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I turned it into roving while I kept dyeing…

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When I ran a dye bath with the rinse water… to my surprise it gave a strong red, stronger than the exhaust dyebath by far.  Here it is on the left, with the original dye bath on the right for comparison.

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I also dyed quite a bit of merino roving I happened to have put by, achieving three different shades. And some more grey corriedale… not bad going from madder root that might have been in those jars for decades.

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June 14, 2014 · 3:16 pm

In preparation for a natural dyeing workshop

As I write, I’m preparing to run a workshop at my Guild.  I’m counting down and there are only a few days left.  Preparation has been going on for weeks now! I’ve skeined beautiful organic wool and mordanted some.

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I’ve washed fleece in two colours and two breeds, and mordanted some.  I’ve decided being able to mordant cold in alum is a real benefit to preparing unspun fibres.  Less opportunity for felting or simply mooshing the fibres.  Three cheers to Jenny Dean, who introduced me to the idea of cold mordanting with alum.

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I treated some merino roving to a cold alum bath too. Later I decided that past unlovely experiments with paj silk could go in the mordant bath with a view to being overdyed.  And added silk embroidery thread.

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I have been packing things into bags and writing lists. I’ve begged milk bottles from coffee carts and turned them into sample cards. Finally, on the weekend, I wandered the neighbourhood on my bike gleaning leaves, and finding some damaged pomegranates that might be used for dyeing–the rats that were scampering along the fence nearby had clearly been having a banquet!  It was overcast, but can you see these two E Cinereas forming an arch at the end of this street?  Cute as a button!

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Ironbarks were oozing kino, which is their main strategy for avoiding pest attack.  This one seemed to have gone a bit too far…

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Some ironbarks were in flower. Gloriously.

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In some streets there was a carpet of flowers on the ground where lorikeets and rosellas had been partying.

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Some of the neighbourhood E Cinereas have recovered from the most recent attack of the chainsaws a bit.

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I stopped off at my favourite E Scoparia on my way home.  It now has some leaves I can reach for the first time since a bough was lopped a couple of years ago.

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So, I came home fully laden.  I even found an E Cinerea branch that had been cut some time ago but must have fallen to the ground more recently. Needless to say, it came home with me.

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Hopefully, my preparations are nearing completion.  I had a dream the other night where my workshop went terribly wrong… for one thing, there were two workshops and I had not prepared for the first one at all… and the Guild hall, which is a bit of a rabbit warren, had several rooms that I had not previously seen!  Perhaps it is the idea of using cochineal for the first time acting on my overdeveloped sense of responsibility…

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May 11, 2014 · 3:29 pm

Handspun socks

Once upon a time there was a braid of Superwash Merino/Bamboo/Nylon blend, especially for sock spinners from Ewe Give Me The Knits, who surely wins a prize for business name.  I spent many an hour, some more patient than others, turning it into 100g of handspun three ply (for those who knit but do not spin, I mean there are three strands going into the final yarn, not that it is finer than ‘fingering’ or ‘4 ply’), high-twist yarn.  There is a previous post about the spinning part.  Fibre selection and spinning strategy were both focused on producing sock yarn.

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In my experience, if I want to produce a fine yarn, especially one with three plies, I have to make sure the singles are really fine.  In this case I went with ‘as fine as possible’, pretty much.  The comments at Guild touched on ‘frog hair’, though needless to say there are some serious fine spinners in the Guild, and I’m not one of them.  Here is my yarn beside some 4 ply (fingering) sock yarns I’ve knit into socks using 3 mm needles.

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Closer… I think my yarn is on the thin side compared to the 4 ply (fingering) yarn I usually would use to knit socks, so I went down a needle size to 2.75 mm (oooh—) and cast on!

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With yarn and needles as fine as any I’ve ever used, this took a little while.  Quite a while.  But in the end… these went off to warm the toes of my fairy godson–and yesterday I sighted them peeking out between his shoes and his jeans as we all pedalled into town to see a fabulous exhibition and talk about political printmaking in South Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. I feel very deeply blessed to have precious friends who appreciate handmade things so fulsomely.

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March 9, 2014 · 3:21 pm

And then I spun some newspaper into yarn and knit a hedgehog.

Apparently, just because I could.  Some time ago I found this link and bookmarked it.  One day this week I went to Green UpGrader again and suddenly I just had to do it.  Soon I went from an ordinary issue of The Guardian to this:

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And after a couple of evenings of rustly spinning, this:

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I am surprised how much I like it. I may have to do it again.  There was some crocking (dye rubbing off), but since I didn’t dye this, I didn’t feel bad about it either!

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Then last night, after a very random but charming conversation on Ravelry where I offered to take suggestions about what to knit with my cassette tape yarn…(cassette tape core spun over natural grey wool or eucalyptus dyed merino)…

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I made this:

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The pattern is Knit Hedgehogs by Purl Soho.  Friends came over late in the evening to sleep over, go to the airport and leave their dog with us while they are in Melbourne.  There was a lot of hilarity, beginning with ‘What are you doing?!’  Then there were suggestions as to whether it looked like an echidna (or a puffer fish), whether my embroidery improved the likeness (or not), whether it was cute (or suspicious)… Then  there was consultation of the interwebs about whether hedgehogs have ears or tails.  We don’t have hedgehogs in this country and we had to reference Wind in the Willows or Beatrix Potter or some such anglophile literature we’d been exposed to as children for any information about hedgehogs we ever had.  So then there were many showings of cute hedgehogs from the interwebs. I’m not sure what the dog made of it.

In short, I still have a lot of cassette tape yarn left!!

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March 5, 2014 · 10:37 am

A new hat and a couple of tea cosies

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The hat knitting is continuing… this one is made from the merino/silk blend I spun on holidays with a band of three ply grey Finn wool.  It’s the Swatchless watch cap by Daniel Yuhas, more or less, but he should be absolved of my knitting crimes.  I’ve already cast on my next hat!

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There has been a season of casting on, so this is a tea cosy knit from a singles yarn composed of grey Finn, silk, glitterati, sari silk, and thread scraps from a friend’s handpun, hand dyed inkle loom weaving threads.  Too precious to waste!

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I like the sprinkling of shiny colours in among the grey wool.  It made me think I should try this technique again.

I have been inviting people who come round for dinner to take a tea cosy home.  Last night we had the luck to have a visit from one of my beloved’s heroines, who was passing through our town for writers’ week.  I was just thrilled when she decided to take that tea cosy home! Speaking of Writers’ Week, I loved the entrance–lots of branches shaped to form an entrance to the gardens where it is held.  The booth to pick up brochures and ask for direction was similarly glorious, and there was a wonderful design of woven branches behind the stage, too.

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I liked that tea cosy so much I decided to knit another right away and finish off the skein!  Here you have it, hot off the needles.  Both tea cosies depart from the excellent Fast and Fun Tea Cozy design by Funhouse Fibers (but I get lazy and just make it up as I go along….)

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November 1, 2013 · 2:28 pm

Silkworms: 7 week update + more wild textured spinning

Well, here are the late bloomers. Yes, only 5 left.

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Everyone else is in here now in another form…

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And meanwhile I decided to try a spinning challenge set up on Ravelry… a yarn generator based on a date system.  What genius on the part of its originator! Sounded like fun to me… I put in the date for my birthday and that meant creating a yarn that incorporated autowrapping (see that rayon thread over the white section?), metallic elements (there are strange and peculiar glitter pompoms from the op shop as well as sparkly gold fibre and gold recycled ribbon)…

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Yellow is required too, so there is some of the coreopsis dyed corriedale, some yellow preloved ribbon (there has to be fabric spinning too), and last year’s silk cocoons…

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Then there is chain plying and the ever present eucalyptus dyed merino… and one mighty strange yarn overall!

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April 12, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The spinning continues

Unfortunately, it has been a time of illness and low energy round here just lately.  Fortunately, spinning provides solace and the level of exercise I’ve been capable of undertaking.

Here, some delicious black baby alpaca I bought from SpunOut at Bendigo (three plied).  It is called Handspinners Dream and, mmmm.  It was! Luxury fibre with a price tag to match.

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I also finished some spinning intended as sock yarn–the purple yarn in the photo.  It is a true three ply yarn with high twist.  I spun it slowly since it has been on the wheel I take to the Guild only twice a month.  There have been many jokes about frog hair, and more than one person has asked me if I am really spinning, because the singles were so fine they couldn’t be seen from across the hall.  I will be so interested to see how this works out as  socks.  Despite all the joking, this is not too fine for sock knitting.  Since I have three pairs of socks on my needles at present and all three are still in the first sock stage, I may not find out for a while.  I have one still on the leg, one just past the heel and still on the gusset, and one almost at the toe.

Back to spinning though–and that is where my time has been spent lately–the purple sock yarn is from Ewe Give Me the Knits.  It’s her Superwash Merino/Bamboo/Nylon blend, especially for sock spinners.  Another lovely spinning experience.  I am warming up to spinning some of the fleece I’ve washed through summer after all this pre-prepared fibre.

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March 24, 2013 · 5:11 pm

After Bendigo

Last year I went to the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show with a friend.  We had a great time, and I spent plenty!  Just recently I decided to spin some of the prepared fibre I bought there.  This is grey merino/llama/silk dyed by the Thylacine in Evandale.  It was luscious to spin and inspired me to get back to dyeing over grey fleece. I chain-plied it to maintain distinct colours.

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I bought some Raxor batts: Corriedale x English Leicester and Blue-faced Leicester in ‘Before dawn’.  Clearly also from my grey period.  I core spun these over a crossbred grey wool core. The pink skein is chain plied merino/bamboo dyed ‘berry lush’ from Kathys Fibres.  All a delight to spin.

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