Onion Dyeing

I've been saving onion skins for dyeing for at least a couple of years.  I had a very large carrier bag full of yellow onion skins and a smaller one of red.  One rainy day in February I got them all out and had a dye session.  First though, I separated out some merino fleece for washing and mordanting with alum and cream of tartar.

Here it is all wrapped up in a piece of fine mesh curtaining :-

I don't like the lock structure of fleece to be messed about with whilst I'm dyeing, hence the bag.  Hopefully this was going to keep the fleece in the same state as before washing (apart from the dirt!).

The onion skins don't look too promising colour-wise, but I've dyed with yellow onion skins before and knew that that was deceiving.  They didn't fail me this time, giving a beautiful sunshiny yellow/orange:-

I separated out some of the locks and carded a rolag just to see how the final colour would change, if at all.  You can see in the photo (left) that the tips of the locks took the colour far better than the rest of the fleece, but the colour was still quite vibrant after carding.

You can't see in this photo, but the rolag above is actually full of little bright orange nepps.  Normally I would pick these out, but I think I'm going to leave them and spin them into the yarn where, hopefully, they'll give bright little pinpoints of colour.

The most surprising thing was the way the mesh curtain took the dye.  I was pretty sure this was totally synthetic and I really didn't think it would take much of the dye.  I was obviously wrong!  I'm saving this to use in some future project or other - everything has a use.

Next came the red onion skins.  Look how bright these are, I had high hopes for these, especially as I'd heard  they might give green.

Oh dear, what a disappointment!  The dye bath was a really dark colour, but after saving these onion skins for what feels like forever, I've decided not to bother in the future.  Still a useful colour, and I will card and spin it as is, but the skins just didn't perform for me.

Five Year Socks!

I'm notoriously harsh when it comes to socks - I wear them out pretty quickly.  Quite surprising then that I've managed to keep some for almost 5 years, and no holes!!!

Confession time - these socks have been sitting in a bag for almost five years waiting to be finished!  There's no other way they'd last that long!!

I found the bag the other day when I was sorting out my old spinning cupboard and moving things up to the new spinning room.  It took me a matter of hours to finish them, so why didn't I do it before?  Mind you, the clock is ticking now.  It'll be interesting to see how long they last on my feet!

Faerie Cashmere

This spin included something I've never spun before - 100g cashmere from Hilltop Cloud.  I've had it for months, but was waiting for that special occasion to spin it.  One of those "down" days when I needed a treat!  Not sure if I spun it on a down day, but I obviously thought I'd waited long enough.  Especially when this came out of the cupboard, and I decided it would be the perfect 2nd ply :-

I bought this plait at Le Lot et La Laine in the summer from Faerie Fiber (Toulouse).  It's the first plait of fibre I've ever bought, mainly because they quite often seemed a bit compacted and I worried they might not be too good to spin.  Not so with this one - it was gorgeously soft and very easy to spin.  I loved the colours as soon as I saw it, and when it was still on the stall towards the end of the afternoon, I had to have it.  Unfortunately, having turned my new spinning room cupboards upside down, I can't find the label that came with it which said what the fibres were.  I know I won't have thrown it away - maybe it's still lurking in the old cupboard which still hasn't been emptied.

Because this was a real treat to spin it had to have a worthy partner for the other ply.  Out came the cashmere I'd been saving for that rainy day.  Another brilliant spin, and it contained some of the same colours.  I failed miserably (again) at getting a photo of the raw fibre, but the spun single is on the left with the Faerie Fiber on the right.

The finished yarn (as usual the sparkly bits don't show up on the photo) = 175g and 387 yards/357m - probably enough for a shawl (you can never have too many shawls!)

So now to trawl through patterns on Ravelry to find the perfect one.

P.S.  I finally found the label for the FaerieFiber plait - it was "Extasy" made up of 58.5% Merino,  25% Tussah Silk, 12.5% Bamboo and 4% Stellina.

New Studio

At long last, after living in this house for over 12 years, I finally have my own workroom/studio.  Up until now I've had to squeeze everything into a small cupboard that would normally just be big enough for maybe the vacuum cleaner, ironing board and associated bits and pieces,  Needless to say, my fleece and wool, etc. spilled out into almost every room in the house, and whenever I needed something that I knew was in that cupboard it was a nightmare to try and find it.  Well no more!

The beam you can see running across the room is actually not as low as it looks, I can just scrape underneath it without hitting my head - hubby at 6 foot 3 inches has a bit of a problem though!  The space at the back is a little attic which I can use for storing bags of fleece and things I don't use very often.

We put in a sofa bed because this room may occasionally be used for guests if the spare room is already occupied.  It's also very handy for just sitting and admiring the view . . .

and has it's own balcony which is very handy for loading spinning wheels and boxes without having to carry them through the house and up a flight of rather steep stairs (the balcony isn't very high and I can reach up from ground-level).

A view from the outside :-

We will eventually re-install the handrail at the front of the balcony (don't want guests falling off!), but I think we'll leave that until I've moved everything up.

Furniture and bits and pieces are gradually moving up there, including this cabinet we managed to acquire for just 70 euros.  In fact, this is only half of what we bought for that price; the rest is in our dining room - bargain!

And this one has just been moved up from our living/sitting area (I think it looks much better up here!).

I still have a lot of sorting out to do before I can say this is finished, and I may have to buy more cupboards, but it is usable now, and is a very pleasant space as it gets the sun for most of the day.

I'm looking forward to many happy hours pottering about in my new room . . . when I get time, of course, which is the next problem!

Cough Remedy

It's that time of year again when the coughs and colds start to rear their ugly heads.  Last week it was my turn and, as we were travelling at the time, I found it particularly difficult to shake off.  I was so glad when we got home to find these in the garden :-

This plant (Verbascum thapsus or Great Mullein) grows wild around us and is particularly useful for getting rid of that persistent residual cough I always seem to be left with - even annoying tickly coughs.  I normally use 2 smallish leaves and make an infusion with thyme, honey (both good for the throat) and mint for extra flavor.

Three or four cups per day over a two day period will generally get rid of the worst of it - much better than taking medication!

In the summer it sends up a tall flower spike, the stem of which is surrounded by tiny yellow flowers.  Apparently these, soaked in olive oil, make a good earache remedy, although I've never tried it myself.

So, if you come across this "weed" in your garden, don't rip it out, let it seed in various places and you'll always have cough medicine at hand.

I even found one growing in the middle of the road outside the house!

Reuben's Blanket

You might be forgiven for thinking that I've been totally idle since my last post in early October, but actually it's been a really hectic time.  We went off on our annual pilgrimage to visit family in early November and were away almost 3 weeks; just got back Tuesday night, pretty tired and full of a cold virus.  Now we need another holiday to get over it!

The run-up to our trip away was pretty busy for me because our first port of call was to be with Eric's youngest son and family.  Baby Reuben was only 6 weeks old when we got there and I'd been making him a baby blanket for what seemed like forever.  By the time we left home it still wasn't finished!  However, I did manage to get it done just in time to hand over the day before we left them!

I chose the Motherhood Blanket by Amanda Bjoerge firstly because I loved the Celtic knot patterns she'd used, and secondly because the knots actually represent motherhood - perfect.  I have plenty of nice fleece I could have used for this but, mindful of the fact that it's for a baby, I wanted it to be easy to wash.  The blanket I made for Reuben's older brother, Brody's Elephant Blanket, was made from handspun merino and his Mum's still very nervous about washing it.  This time I bought some super wash Falkland fleece which means it can withstand a bit more handling without the risk of it felting.

I started spinning for this project back in September which (I thought!) gave me plenty of time to get it finished.  After all, apart from the cables (and I've knitted lots of complicated cables in my lifetime), this was a pretty simple pattern.  Yeah right!  The first obstacle was when I realised it was a charted pattern - I'm not good with charts - and it took a bit of figuring out for me just to get started with the knitting.

The Falkland spun up well but it did have a bit of a funny smell until I'd washed it.  This was the first time I'd used super wash wool so I really didn't know what to expect.

The blanket begins in the centre with quite a complicated cabled Celtic knot, which isn't represented very well in this photo, but you can see it's fairly complex.  I must have pulled this back at least five times before I finally got it right - at one point the wool was getting so grubby and messed about with that I had to cut it off and start again.  No problem, this would be plain sailing from here!

The problems started at the very beginning of the next cabled section and I just couldn't get it to work out.  Whatever I did I was two stitches out.  What with pulling back, re-knitting, checking the pattern for the umpteenth time and throwing it into a corner for a few days until I felt like trying again, it took me two whole weeks to move on from this.  I finally had a "lightbulb moment" one morning at 5 a.m. - at one point whilst knitting the central knot we had to move the stitch markers by 2 stitches in the middle of a 5 stitch increase.  Voila - we had the same increase stitch here!  I checked with Amanda Bjoerge to make sure it was right before I carried on.  Hopefully she'll mention this in the pattern for future buyers.  It might have seemed obvious to the designer, but people like me (duh!) are bound to buy this pattern occasionally!

By now, I was really short of time for finishing this but, thankfully, everything went well from there (apart from one tiny mistake I found in the pattern which I've still to tell her about) and I only had a small amount to do by the time we left.

Oh, I almost forgot.  Sod's law dictates that nothing was going to go my way with this project.  This was my final ball of wool just after the end fell off my bobbin!  That took a bit of sorting out!

Finally, here's the finished blanket, washed and blocked.

Plus one of the spinner/knitter :-

and Baby Reuben seemed pretty happy with it too.

Mum and baby :-

and a final bit of detail :-

Lovely pattern, lovely blanket . . . but would I do it again?  Absolutely!!  I love a challenge!

Wedding Yarn

It seems I've been neglecting my blog again - a month since the last post.  To compensate, I'm posting photos of a recent project that took a lot of planning and that I'm not too sure about now it's finished.

I started with some natural coloured merino, tussah silk, various beads and bits and pieces of silk and lace from my wedding dress.

A few years ago I dismantled my wedding dress after it spending 22 years packed away in a box.  I made another dress from it and wore it to my stepson's wedding.  The bits I've used in this yarn were from a frill on the bottom of the original dress.  I removed the lace and made it into little bows, then cut the silk fabric into strips and knotted them twice (one knot on top of the other to make a bigger knot).  The beads were then threaded onto locks of fleece, ready to spin into the yarn.

I spun all the bits into the merino and then plied it with a strand of handspun tussah silk. The resulting yarn wasn't quite as thick as I'd planned, even though I'd spiral plied it with the silk, so I spun it back on itself making it double the thickness.

I'm really not sure about this yarn - maybe I over-estimated my spinning abilities, or maybe it'll grow on me.  I once heard someone say that if she made something she wasn't too happy with she put it in a bag under her bed for a while and was invariably happier with it when she took it out again.  If only I could remember who it was I'd ask her to put this under her magic bed - maybe it would improve my yarn!

Here are some close-ups of some of the details.  I quite like the way the beads and bows etc. have turned out - it's just the overall effect of the yarn I'm not happy with.

This was going to be made into a necklace, and maybe still will, but for the moment I'll file it away in the hope that I'll like it better when I re-find it in a year's time!