Alice Jean

A while ago I bought some terrific yarn in one of those st Luke's Hospice shops for a nice price. Soft enough, superwash, 20% lambs/ 80% merino. Only the colour, sage, was not to my liking. After the dyebath it looked like this Now, a few months later, I've knitted 3 skeins into this pretty cardigan, better known as Helena Really a pleasure to knit. Now it is packed and tomorrow it will be in the post to this precious baby girl.

Remember the handspun I got from Sarah ? It is dyed. The colours are the result of a collab between my daughter and me. She preferred actually far more pink, but as pretty much of her jumpers are in pink, I convinced her another colour would also be nice. She came up with blue with a bit pink and violet. I think she has chosen well. Handspun BFL/Corriedale by Babylonglegs , hand dyed in shades of blue, periwinkle, pink and violet. The matching solid skein is periwinkle. What will become of this? It will be stashed for some time now as there are many other projects that need to done and/or finished. And when all is done? Well, might be a hoodie.

She is not allowed to do her arty work on the floor and she knows that. But sometimes it is too tempting for her. I simply had to snap a photo before wiping it clean. After that she hand painted the hand spun Corriedale I got from Sarah . She choose the colours: hot fuchsia, blue and violet and had a lot of fun dyeing the wool. Aren't the pink gloves pretty? She did a very fine job! We're not quite sure what to knit with the wool, but Dory is leaning towards a bag. She loves bags.

In the mail this week a lovely set of stitch markers. Ladybirds, so well chosen. Thanks so much Lieke , in the mean time I managed to take them out of the dolls house and to put them in my knitting bag. And because I am one of the participants in the Vintage Socks swap it occurred to me it could be a benefit to order the book . And I am glad I did, it is full of beautiful sock patterns. I also tried out to dye with Indigo. Before I believed it was a very difficult dye to use, now I know better. Dyeing with Indigo is pretty easy to do and a bit magical. In the vat the wool (and dye) are a greenish yellow, the horrid shade of this colour. As soon as the wool comes out of the vat and is exposed to the air, the colour changes into blue. The large skein is a Scottish Highland pure new wool, the smaller skein is 75% BFL/ 25% nylon.

I had 4 skeins, each approximately 60-70 grams, of hand spun undyed wool. Excellent to try out some natural dyeing. In the past I promised myself only to dye with natural dyes after I had done a workshop. But the workshop has still to be done. I bought some books instead, browsed the internet for more information and to buy some ingredients. After that I dyed the hand spun. I still don't know whether it was a bit disappointing or not. On the other hand it was the very first time to use natural dyes, so there is still a lot to discover and learn. The wool is of unknown sheep. The lady who did spin it has five sheep, but did not tell me the breed and I did not ask for it. The wool is a bit rough, I am planning to knit Dory a skirt out of it.... albeit she is currently very picky with what to wear and, above all, what not . Unfortunately hand knit items are in her prohibited list. Left to the right: dyed in madder root (I used only a little), annatto seed second dyebath, annatto seed ...

YES! I like to have this title above a post, so therefore I decided to use it once. I am in quite some time now and have to say it is a great resource. They have wonderful stuff on there. But one disadvantage of Ravelry is it kind of interferes with posting new projects here on this blog. I will try to make it up with this post. The Wild West longies are done for a while now and on their way home. It was fun to make them. The pink ruffles longies are made of Blue Faced Leicester. Very pink, very girly... WIP: a pair of longies knit up with Pirates Treasure . I love how the colours are turning out. And then I want to share a colourway that seems to be very popular at the moment. It could have something to do with the name: Wicked Night .

Actually I was thinking to put down ' Ravelry ' as title, following the tendency of many bloggers lately. Yesterday I got their invitation. Reading through the guidelines I found out I should better use FireFox with Ravelry. No, I did not download it, I think it can be interesting to find the bugs while using IE. But the main reason is I am very used to Internet Explorer of course, LOL! Another thing was I have to use Flickr for my photo's. So I have to transfer a lot of pictures once more. And that means a lot of work, because I decided to browse all my folders again in order to find all my knitting and dying projects (I'm more organized in this for only the past year and a half). I found far more than I thought I had, so now I am questioning myself what to and what not to add to Ravelry. For now, I want to share some of those pictures with you on this blog. They are about 3 years old :). My first attempt to embellish a soaker. The soaker was knitted of Texelaar wool h...

Darcy is a very good friend of mine. Although we have never met each other in real life and there is a lot of distance between us (she is in California, I am in the Northwest of England), she feels like a sister to me. We email a lot, almost every day, about all kind of things. Because she is recovering now from some major surgeries, I felt I had to make her something. She told me once she loves greens and Elfine , so it was not difficult to decide what it would be. The wool I used is 75% BFL/25% nylon superwash sock wool, kettle dyed by myself. It was the first time I knitted with this wool. It is very soft, has however a slightly tendency of splitting.

How did I ever manage without a yarn swift? I got the Glimakra umbrella swift only yesterday and already considering a second swift. So easy to wind dyed large skeins into smaller skeins :). It took me quite a long time to decide what type would be best. I read many opinions about several types and of course the experiences where all different. So why did I choose the umbrella model in the end? Because I think I would loose or break a peg of this model pretty easily. Besides that the price of this swift was reasonable and available within the UK. We tried out the swift his morning with the some of new Blue Faced Leicester that just had arrived. D. dived into the box straight away. This BFL is even softer than the BFL we had before!

I have had some questions about methods of dyeing. Maybe it is fun to share some pictures with you to get the visual impression. Remember, this is just my way of Space Dyeing, not the way! This is the first colour, the lightest of all. Yellow ;). I let this simmer for a while. When the desired colour was reached, I pulled the dyed part out of the dye bath and put the next portion of the skein in. The water was still yellow, I had only to pour some red in to get the orange colour After the orange I poured in the red and repeated the whole process until the whole skein was dyed in the shades to my satisfaction. The black colour is the very last of them all. The photo is a bit steamy. :) The advantage of a ceramic hob. The result: another Black Rainbow!

Actually I dyed more yarn than showed in this picture ;). With the Mint-Mocha-Chocolate and Cream BFL I knitted a pair of customer shorts. I am very pleased how the colours turned out, it was kind of an unusual combination for me.

I love to do both. The last couple of weeks where like crazy, as the holidays used to be. We have had a lot of people around here and had a great time. Of course I did some knitting work and dyed wool. I bought merino sock yarn and merino Aran weight. They dye beautifully and easily. Before Christmas I did a mini swap with a friend back in the Netherlands. Doortje and I were very excited to get a lovely Pippi Longstocking skorts. Dd loves Pippi and her friends, she has all the DVD's of the original series and watches them regularly. I made for my friends daughter a pair of shorts. I used Blue Faced Leicester, dyed the wool following the Amazing Gradients tutorial of IBK , knitted a pair of shorts out of it and embellished them with a castle in the clouds.