I haven't been lazing around as you might think from the lack of entries to my blog! it's just the usual pre-christmas madness - too many plans and a serious lack of hands! and I don't even have pix to show yet for the things I made in the meantime.... you just never know who might read your blog and I don't want to spoil the secret santas by putting them online.
just the one here, I finished the moebius scarf with an attached i-cord. the lilac is merino with soy silk, singles of each plied together, dyed with the 2nd bath of cochenille. the white is one thread of angora and one of mulberry silk, plied together. I put in some seed beads, but they are very small and not visible on the photo. I originally planned to use bigger ones, but then thought, that the feeling of cold glass beads might not be so nice in a short scarf! the ones in it now are small and they stay in the fluff of the angora, visible but not cold on the skin. of course all threads are handspun.
the black scarf in the woven looking pattern from the fall knitty is nearly finished too, as is the embroidered scarf, two more ticks on my to-do list:)) I am left with a lot of alpaca spinning and knitting a set of hat, scarf and maybe mittens - but urgently, as the post takes quite some time before christmas. the stash shift for the OLG is sorted, all ready to be packed and sent out, puh....
in the dyeing section it's quieter at this time of the year. I dug out several bags of avocado kernels and skins from the freezer and chopped them up. I put them in several glass jars and stuck all of it in the canning cooker, as I am supposed (at least that's what the article in the spinoff some years ago advised) to heat it all every couple of days to prevent mould! I just hope I won't forget it one of these days as I am all keen on the reds and burgundy (I only bought the brown-skinned Hass variety!) and not on beiges and browns! I received a large bag of dye materials from my friend, who had planned on dyeing for years but realised that she hasn't got the time to do it all. it's mostly logwood, brazilwood and fustic, also some weld and some madder.... I tried the fibres of coconut before and didn't get anything much apart from a mucky, dirty beige - so I put those out into the garden as mulch. they didn't look inviting enough to try them for spinning - I might still need the skin on my fingers, esp. as I had planned to work with the silk hankies and the mulberry top!:))
we did have a nice clear evening after a very mixed day yesterday - here is a photo I took before dusk.... the curtains of rain in the background had just moved away a few seconds earlier!
3 comments:
That photo is so good. Makes me happy to live in Ireland.
I love the moebius scarf ooh! the lucky lucky recipient.
I am interested in how you get on with the avocado skins. I saw this demonstrated at Colour Congress 2002 and came back full of the desire for the red. I had little luck but I had to use dried avoacado which Carol Leigh(Lee?) said did not work as well. I couldn't help feeling that working with trays of overripe avocados (which is what Carol used was slightly different from getting under ripe ones that had to be dried) as there were not enough otherwise. So I shall be very interested in how you get on! And no doubt very envious when your lovely reds appear. (I only got beiges)
I hope it works out - my husband had to eat a lot of avocados:)) I did think of drying the skins first, but I had no time to chop up the seeds then and just stuffed everything into the freezer. I read somewhere that careful drying should leave the pigments in better form than freezing, but so far I haven't had negative results with it! the only colour change was with gorze flowers! when I pick them very fresh and use them immediately I end up with a bright lemon yellow - if they just sit for a few hours, are frozen or dried, I always have a golden yellow as a result - strange! no difference whatsoever with the rest! well, the exciting thing with natural dyes is that you never know in advance what you end up with:))
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