Tag Archives: yarn

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 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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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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January 27, 2014 · 8:50 pm

More socks for happy feet

More socks were completed over the end of year break. These are for my daughter, who got to try them out for fit and taste while we were visiting–and what a pleasure it was to be visiting!

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The pattern is Jaywalker, by Grumperina, and the yarn is Kathys Fibres Wool/Bamboo/Nylon Sock in Stained Glass.  Jaywalker is not a very stretchy stitch pattern, but it is simple to memorise, a couple of stitch markers make it easy to execute, and it is dramatic in a suitable colourway.  I always love wearing them myself.  I thought the yarn called out for something more than a simple rib.  The lary colours raised eyebrows while they were in progress… but it’s all a question of what the recipient will enjoy, and hopefully she will enjoy these for years to come.

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January 21, 2014 · 9:17 am

What to do with silk cocoons 3: Spin them onto a yarn!

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I used Jacey Boggs‘ techniques to do this…

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I feel a tea cosy coming on!  Big thanks to the friend who gifted these cocoons: you know who you are!  This is really what I had planned all along to do with my home grown cocoons, but they turned out to be rather thin.  I guess I am raising silkworms of uncertain parentage, not silkworms that have been bred for their fine silk or silkworms that have had optimum treatment!  Their cocoons are certainly not as strong or as thick-walled as the cocoons in this picture.  So… perhaps they are not suitable to this use.  There have turned out to be many others!

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January 20, 2014 · 11:16 am

What to do with silk cocoons 2: Spin raw cocoons

On the last Guild meeting day for 2013 I wandered into the library intent on borrowing for the coming 2 months–including holiday time.  One of my loans was A Silk Worker’s Notebook by Cheryl Kolander (Interweave Press, Colorado USA 1985). She describes spinning raw (softened in water but not degummed), degummed whole and cut and degummed cocoons.  Choices, choices, choices!

She instructs the reader to soak the cocoons to soften them.  I soaked them cold and nothing much happened.

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I double checked and Cheryl Kolander says to soak in warm water.  I did, and by bedtime, I had spun a very small number of cocoons over a considerable amount of time with great effort and decided soaking until the following evening would be necessary, since I do in fact have a job to go to…

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Kolander’s instructions make gradually drawing out fibre from one end of the cocoon sound straightforward.  Bless her heart, if she can do that, she has greater skills and/or strength than I do!  I have never applied so much sheer force to draft anything.  I found I had to snip the cocoon to make a start, enlarge the hole by pulling, remove the chrysalis and then tear or stretch the cocoon far enough that I could grab one half in one hand and the other half in my other hand and create a bridge of fibres I could attenuate and attempt to join to my thread.  All while still wet.

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Kolander promised a stiff thread and mine did not disappoint. Can you see the end of the thread heading off to the upper right in the next picture?  No wind or special effects were applied to this image!

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This was the smallest reel I could find.  But I am delighted to have managed to spin a thread.  I drew the line at plying and left it as a single.  As always, experiments like these give some finger-and-muscle-understanding and not just a vague intellectual sense of the tremendous skill and sheer hard work and time commitment of people who create fine reeled silk and all manner of silk yarns and fabrics with the most basic of equipment. I won’t be giving up my day job anytime soon!

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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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December 21, 2013 · 9:00 am

Fractal spinning

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One of my lovely friends was travelling through country Australia whe she saw this braid and thought its colours were gorgeous–and then had the insight that I would know what to do with it!  I would tell you the dyer’s name or the fibre content (merino, at a guess) but it didn’t come with a label.  Around the time it arrived I read the second issue of Ply!  Magazine and the article on fractal spinning had me thinking of this braid.

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I decided to try–as I have never tried fractal spinning before. And this is the result… which might make a good hat for the friend who liked its colours so much…

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