Tag Archives: wool

March 17, 2014 · 11:12 am

Spinning up a storm. And some more newspaper.

I am continuing to ply the holiday spinning, but this is the last of it… This coreopsis-dyed yellow yarn has been waiting patiently for weeks.  The eucalyptus-dyed yarn is a new spin.

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Of course, there is more eucalyptus-dyed corriedale spun on holiday and plied recently.  I elected to keep the two shades distinct.  When I began dyeing I preferred dyeing yarn and was afraid to dye fleece.  Now I prefer to dye the fleece, because it gives me so much choice when it comes to spinning (and I have learned a few things about controlling the temperature of the dye bath to avoid felting).

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I also decided that I could probably refine my newspaper spinning skills, and you know, I think I have!  It’s possible to coax the newspaper strips into a tube as you spin, and I like the effect better.  I think I also succeeded in creating a lower twist single that still holds together.  More fun than I had ever expected…

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March 15, 2014 · 11:59 am

Several green things…

Thanks so much to everyone who has been part of the conversation about trees.  It is always good not to be alone.

One of the things I am doing in an effort to build a greener neighbourhood at present is sprouting saltbush from seed to plant around here:  sharing it with friends who want to plant native plants and planting it in the public spaces where the earth is bare or weedy.  They have gone from tiny baby plants a couple of weeks ago:

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To the five or six leaf stage when I think I might start planting out.  I’ve scoped out the River Red (E Camaldulensis) that is still standing in our street and it looks like traffic beneath it has subsided and weeds have begun to fill the bare space.  The time might be right this weekend.

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It has been a low knitting week. Just the same, a hat managed to reach completion and the intended recipient agreed to be photographed after we went running one morning.  He turned out to like the hat enough to have it… especially good in view of his recent birthday!  This is Jared Flood’s Turn a Square, a very spare and elegant pattern for just the kind of hat my beloved friend likes to wear.  The wool is handspun–from memory it was a merino/silk blend from Pigeonroof Studios that I acquired when someone else on Ravelry was destashing–the photo of the braid is years old!  It is an especially lush fibre, beautifully dyed–I held onto it for years before I felt I could do it justice as a spinner.

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Meetings have been my knitting time this week.  I am one of those brazen hussies who knit in meetings.  I usually ask if people mind.  In big meetings, I ask the people nearby who are most likely to be troubled by my knitting, and they often tell stories of knitters they have known and/or loved.  I aim to have read the papers prior to going to meetings (if it’s that kind of meeting), choose knitting I can do without counting or pattern checking, and always let the knitting take second place to paying attention, contributing and note taking.  I attend a lot of meetings where I sit beside people who are following their email on a tablet or phone, so personally I think knitting is fast becoming less distracting by comparison with other things that routinely happen in meetings I attend!

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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 7, 2014 · 2:36 pm

Eucalyptus Stricklandii

Eucalyptus Stricklandii is in bloom at the moment.

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There are a row of these trees growing along a main road near a friend’s place in the Northern suburbs, and I have admired them each time I’ve visited.  This time I stopped and sampled as well.  I wasn’t the only one. The tree was full of bees, but bees don’t understand about pausing graciously when someone offers to take your picture and make you famous (ahem!) on the web.

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There were also fully mature fruit:

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And fruit that were nearing maturity:

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Buds as well, since this is a eucalypt…

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And rather spectacular bark.

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Here’s the tree as a whole…

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And someone’s tenderly crafted home, fallen to the ground, neatly combining flyscreen wire with vegetation and paper that has been weathered until pliable.

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Cocoa and chocolate?  Chestnut and walnut?

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February 26, 2014 · 9:52 am

Sock yarn overdyeing progress and an indigo update

Socks are one of my go-to projects.  I’m sure you’ve noticed.  They are portable and don’t require a pattern (for me, any more) and so they accompany me on public transport, to meetings and conferences, picnics and TV shows. Admittedly, I am not usually making fancy socks.

A couple of years back I acquired a lot of pre-loved patonyle (this is a wool/nylon blend and probably one of the best known Australian sock yarns).  Patonyle has been around a long time.  When I found this lot at a garage sale some of it was in 1 oz balls (Australia gave up imperial measures in 1970–to oversimplify).  I’ve been working my way through this haul for quite some time.  Today I pulled out all my ball bands.  Some have that souped up 19760s-70s styling (in lime green and purple–at top right), the pallid specimen in the top left corner is the current 100g format, the only ball I bought new–and those ochre coloured wrappers surely predate the 1970s.  And … there are quite a few of them!

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No wonder it has taken awhile to turn it all into socks.  I’ve used this wool with all manner of natural dyes, with greater and lesser success.  After the recent indigo saga began (update below), I looked at the remainder.  Some dyed with eucalypt, some with plum pine, which I now know won’t last long, a leftover black bean ball and some in the original grey.

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I decided to overdye the black bean, grey and plum pine yarn with eucalypt and made my way past one of my favourite E Scoparias, collecting fallen leaves and bark on my way back from the shops.  On went the pots. One contains the fruit of past harvests… mostly E Scoparia bark.

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The other contains what I collected the day I started writing this post: E Scoparia leaves and bark.  We have had sudden rain and wind after a prolonged hot spell, so there were leaves and a few pieces of bark from other trees in there and the smell of E Citriodora wafted up from this pot as soon as it came to a simmer, then died away.  The nearest lemon scented gum is only a few metres from where I was gathering.

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Meanwhile, I cast on with the yarn that is already in the classic eucalypt colours…

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And here are those blue, plum and grey yarns after their trip through my dye pots…

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On the indigo front, here are the yarns after soaking in soy and drying.  They are lying across a nodding violet in a hanging pot so you can get some sense of how stiff they are!

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I let them dry out really well and have since been soaking and rinsing.  The soy milk soak has meant that more indigo is washing out of the sock yarn, which is what I had hoped for.  I am reasoning that the soy has bonded with some of the loose particles of indigo, rendering them capable of being washed out (rather than coming off on my hands, since I couldn’t rinse any more of the indigo out previously).  I am going to keep soaking and rinsing until that stops… and then try knitting again!

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February 24, 2014 · 9:21 am

Cool spectrum gradient yarn

There has been some plain Jane spinning.  Three ply natural Polwarth, finaly plied after a long wait. Not my best work, unfortunately.  One of the singles is plumper and fluffier than the other two.  Just the same, it’s yarn and it’s a true three ply made from three singles.

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In the not-so-plain stakes, there has also been plying of some of the holiday spinning.  This one is Malcolm the Corriedale, dyed yellow with osange orange and my mother’s coreopsis flowers (she is generous enough to collect her dead flowers for me and such a committed gardener that she deadheads her coreopsis).  I overdyed with indigo to create greens and, of course, blue.

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No sign of crocking, just in case you’re wondering!  I have several more flour sacks of this fibre carded, pulled into roving through a diz and ready to spin.  Mmmm!

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The yarn is three ply and I’ve chain plied it so it will stripe… and just for the sheer pleasure of it.  Because I met internet spinners before I met many in real life, chain plying never seemed to me to be an unusual skill.  I took it up quite early in my spinning career and expected it to be challenging, because I was beginner and most things were challenging.  While I was plying this yarn at my regular Guild group, women who have been spinning for decades were commenting about how easy I made it look.  Ah, the warm glow of competence…  I admire all the things they can do that I find difficult, and there they are, doing just the same thing in reverse.

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February 20, 2014 · 8:32 am

Let’s try that again!

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My indigo dyed sock yarn emerged from its vinegar and water soak a little improved.  Instead of being able to see blue on my fingers after just twisting the skeins and then being sble to see the track yarn takes around my fingers when I knit in blue detail after only a row or two… it took winding the skein into a ball to produce this effect…

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I decided to try casting on.  After casting on 64 stitches…

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(That would be the long tail cast on for knitters who need to know!)  Well, it’s an option to knit and get blue fingers: people who seem to know on Ravelry say the resulting garment will not lose dye onto the wearer.  Why not, I wonder–as a sock will clearly be in friction with the feet it is on and crocking is all about dye loss through friction rather than washing.  Still, a little slower rate of dye loss would be my preference!  I’ve checked with the redoubtable J N Liles The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing (1990), and he would appear to be the source of my belief that if indigo crocks it will keep doing so.  He offers a method for addressing the problem that seems entirely logical but does involve some effort.  There is another simple solution suggested on Ravelry–a soymilk soak.  Since finding it mentioned on Ravelry, I’ve found John Marshall offering soymilk as a solution to crocking here.

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On the premise of doing the simple things first, I’ll try that before proceeding to take Mr Liles’ advice, which would have to wait for a day with some relaxed hours.  As it happens, there were two part-used boxes of soymilk in the tearoom fridge at work… they have been there a long while and no one is claiming knowledge (one of them is mine but I’m not sure which one!)  They smell fine but I think they’re past the point of safe human consumption. What an opportunity!  Now we wait.

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I made a little hat to match the big one.  Same basic hat, smaller, and top-down so I could use all the yarn.  I am sure it will fit a little person or perhaps a doll or a bear…

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And… I had a score at the op shop (thrift store) on my way home from work.  I could not resist all that thread for A$2 and there were so many examples of lovely embroidery I had to bring one home…

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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 3, 2014 · 8:55 pm

There are never too many socks or too many friends to knit socks for…

Another pair of socks reached completion on the weekend.  Their final moments happened at a long lunch, on a farm, where–I admit–my knitting was much commented on but did not seem to offend.  Two more sets of slippers were negotiated over lunch, and it was a truly lovely afternoon. I took a picture of my sock-in-progress on the table, a la Yarn Harlot…

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And the finished socks are ready.  The friend for whom they are intended is a big repairer and recycler.  One of the biggest I know, which is saying quite a lot.  She’s coming around to finish up rehabilitating a table this week, and when I saw her on the weekend she showed off some pretty wonderful jeans mending.  When I told her about my Mum’s favourite way to mend jeans, she knew that method already and had tried it on sheets.  Say no more.  You can’t talk the pros and cons of different mending strategies with just anyone.  She is a sister!  If she can’t already darn, she’ll want to learn, and I am one of the keepers of the skill for future generations–only too happy to teach her.  [I’ve asked now, and can confirm she already knows how to mend]. So, her ball of darning wool is right there ready to add into the small pile of woolly goodness that is soon to be hers.

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The yarn is locally dyed by Kathys Fibres–wool/bamboo/nylon, autumn colourway.

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February 1, 2014 · 8:54 pm

Eucalyptus Rummeryi

A eucalyptus windfall will often get my attention… and never more so than when the tree is one I have never tried and which a more knowledgeable person has labelled for the edification of passersby such as myself.  E Rummeryi is native to NSW but seen here growing in Botanic Park, slim, straight and already tall.

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Bark…

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Immature fruit:

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In flower, but quite high up and on a breezy day (this is a way of apologising for the quality of the picture)!

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Results from a standard dye pot…

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