The Second Sock

"The second sock" - sort of implies there was a first sock, doesn't it?  Actually, there was a first sock which was given to our neighbour Rob on his birthday.  He should have had two socks for his birthday present, but I ran out of both time and yarn.  Luckily, he didn't mind and now has two socks to wear instead of hopping on one foot!

The yarn for these was made up of 3 different fibres : Jacob lamb from Rob's flock, Ambrose's baby alpaca (also from Rob's animals) and some Italian mohair I bought at the last Lot et la Laine festival here in France.  I used the opposing ply system again, as Eric's socks (The Engineer's Socks) seem to be lasting quite well apart from a couple of moth holes that have just appeared in the leg.  The opposing ply system uses three plies - two are spun in a clockwise direction, one is spun in an anti-clockwise direction, then the three are plied together in an anti-clockwise direction which adds twist to the third ply and gives a bit more strength to the yarn.

The finished yarn was flecked with white (mohair), brown (Jacob) and ginger (baby alpaca).  It's a very subtle fleck and doesn't show well on photos.  I was woefully lax at taking photos of this project, but did manage a pic of the 2nd sock :-

Thankfully, the two socks both came out the same size - I was a bit worried about that because the first one had been given away before I started the second.  By the way, you'll notice a small ribbed section in the middle of the sock, I like to do this as the rib sort of "hugs" your feet and makes them feel more cosy.

So, another test for this engineered sock yarn.  I'll be interested to see how they perform on a different pair of feet.

Olive Leaves

After trimming my olive tree recently (long overdue), I pared off the bark for the February dyeing project on my natural dye calendar and put it in a jar with water to soak for a while. Rather than throw away the leaves, I decided to make another dye with those.

It took flipping ages picking all these leaves off the branches.  When I got to 500g, I thought I'd probably got enough and put the rest on the bonfire pit.

I'd read that it can take 3-4 hours boiling to extract the colour from olive leaves, and this proved quite accurate.  I'm not sure how long they actually cooked for, because I did it over about 3 days, but it was at least 4 hours, probably more.  The resulting dye looked quite promising :-

but I realised I would probably only get a pale yellow (or the dreaded beige) from this.  I strained the leaves and added 100g of Cotswold fleece, hoping I'd get more colour if I used a smaller amount of fleece.  I didn't use a mordant (with hindsight, possibly I should have) because I thought there would be a fair amount of tannins in there.  Obviously not, as this is what came out :-

It is yellow, but very very pale.  I admit to being rather disappointed with it.  Not to be defeated, I tried dunking some of it in a vinegar/water solution, and another piece in ammonia/water.  The vinegar didn't seem to do much (left on the photo below), but the ammonia did the business (right) - I'm happy with this yellow.

I know this is still wet, but I think it will still be quite a nice colour when it dries.  The rest of the fleece was dunked into the ammonia solution, and I'm quite pleased with the outcome.  Mission accomplished!

And . . . it's not beige!