show your colours - purple

I am late, but I didn't make the "purple" yesterday:(( funny - because it's my favourite colour! I like the dark purples and aubergines most of all - not so much the light lavender tones and pastels. and I do have quite a lot of purple garments, even though most of them are commercially made! don't know why - the only aubergine sweater I ever knitted, was done with dark purple chenille. my sister fell for it big time - and eventually I sent it to her, which must have been a mistake, because she hasn't said "thank you" for it once:(( and of course I didn't take a picture of it either!

so this is one purple hand-made item. I made the bag for our last "secret santa" at the Connacht Textile Crafters. I think the recipient was quite happy with it - at least judging by the ahs and ohs I overheard:)) the yarn is kilcarra tweed, which I knitfelted and later embroidered with threads from Oliver Twists. the small insert for the mobile phone is detachable and can be used without the strap, too.
of course I like purple in flowers as well - here a few examples:

a gloxinia with a very dark purple center - another victim of the dreaded vine weevil:(

the very dark purple buddleia "black knight" - I especially like the contrast of the dark flowers with the orange center! it can be used for dyeing - resulting in a rather acidic yellow!

this is another aquilegia, a. atrata - quite a large variety - and the flowers dye!

this is a small viola, black molly, which happily self-seeds all over my garden and pots, which is a good thing as the flowers can be picked for dyeing - they give anything between a smokey blue to a minty green, which I really like! a pity, that the flowers are so small, but they freeze well and they do flower from spring to autumn, so plenty to pick, if you can bear it!

so, this is purple - light blue will follow later! right now I have to take my chance outside as the sun has come out and the garden is calling (more like screaming!)....

show your colours - rosy and pink

it's quite late already - the day for rose coloured items is nearly over and the pink is creeping up! so I'll put both of them together - with good reason. first of all many flowers have shades of both in one blossom - and also I'll skip the textile area here - as I said, I am not a "pastel" person and I don't have too many pinks either (one cone of extremely vivid pink cotton does come to mind - but I haven't done anything with it yet:))

so - flowers it is:

here are some of the masses of clematis flowers that cover an old iron gate at the back of our garden just now (in fact, all of the pix here show plants that flower right now!). I like the flowers - but I also like the fluffy seed heads they form later in the year!

those are apple blossoms - shortly before they open and turn into white - the tree is aptly named "everest" - though it could be called "avalanche" just as well! at this time of the year (if the rain will ever stop...) it turns into one white fluff of flowers and when the sun warms the air, bees and bumble bees are swarming around it.

this is an aquilegia that I grew from seeds just last spring. it was a mixture of colours and shapes and all of them turned out nicely. one small packet of seeds and at least 15 new plants for my garden:)

this is a - sedum? I am not sure, but it grows in my stone trough, stays very low and flowers for a long time in spring - with very cute flowers in everyting from nearly white to hot pink.

the next candidate is a good example for rosy and pink in one plant - a scented pelargonium - extremely tough, with nice flowers and a gorgeous scent! what else can one ask from a single plant? it survived outside all winter and is already growing and flowering away again.

this is one of my favourite plants - a camellia. unfortunately they tend to be attacked by vine weevils and I have to buy new plants every now and then:(( they seem to be extremely tasty - well, what can one expect from a relation of the tea plant?

so, this is it for two days - maybe I'll manage to put together the coat I am still knitting - that would be something I could show in grey - or maybe silver, if I stretch it a bit! I am not sure if I'll manage to attach the lower part to the top tonight - a lot of kitchener stitch, which is not exactly my favourite thing to do....

show your colours - dark red

as I said before - I don't have any red or dark red flowers out in the garden right now - but we do have quite a few trees and shrubs with red leaves! just as an example, the one below is a purple plum - which has quite dark leaves that go lighter after a while in the sun... which we don't have much of right now - so the leaves are still safe:)
unfortunately I don't have much in the way of dark red yarn either! though I like the red fibres I found in my stash - but they come from a colour sample bag by wollknoll in germany. only small amounts - and those didn't even turn out right in the picture. the red on top isn't as garish and the one to the left isn't as purple! but the weather is so bad outside, that there was no chance of taking nicer pix today:((

the one part of my stash, where I have quite a lot of red - is the bead stash! I don't usually collect huge amounts of materials, which I don't often use - but with beads I find that it is far easier to store a lot of choice and dig it out when needed. they don't take up much space and in my experience you rarely find the ones you want, if you do need them urgently!

tomorrow we are off to rosy and pink colours- which is far easier at least where flowers are concerned. the stash is a different matter - I am just not someone who wears rose colours and even pink is a rare colour for me! I'll see what I can find... if all else fails - I'll just show you a nice rosy piglet:)

Show your colours - red

red wasn't a colour I could find easily outside today - grey would have been easier as it was drizzly and muggy all day! luckily my stash contained a few reds. the picture above shows some wools I dyed with brazilwood on alum - the round bag in the background is made from the same yarn, but felted afterwards (and embroidered).

the pix below shows some bought wool fibres I use for felting - with the flash the upper strong red could be called orange, too!

this was the only remotely red bit I found in the garden (yesterday!) - an old leaf, still hanging on the shrub from last year...

but when I made my lunch it occured to me that the obvious choice for red would be - tomatoes of course! hmm, delicious - dark rye bread with sour cream, tomatoes and fresh cress - yummeeh!

Show your colours - orange

this time I've turned it around - first the fibre colours, followed by garden colours. I dug out a few "oranges" from my stash - very different, but of course some people might argue that one is nearly red and the other one more yellow. the trouble with showing colours can be that they look different in a picture and in reality! I consistently have troubles with green yarns or fibres, esp. when the green goes into the olive-khaki range. I could of course fiddle around in photoshop, but I don't want to do that - it takes a lot of time and from magazine pictures I know that you can change mucky food pictures to enticing meals:))

those yarns are either wool, wool/silk or wool/angora - the balls in the middle are dyed with gaywool colours, the yellow skein on the right is the second bath from yellow cosmos - and the oranges on the left are dyed with red dahlia flowers (samples dyed by D. Fischer). the skein on top wasn't dyed by me - so I don't know what was involved....

this of course is one of my favourite oranges in the garden - the flowering berberis again. with the reddish leaves it really does look fiery - and the bees love it!

still a berberis - close up they look like little bells, when they aren't fully opened yet. the shrubs are in full bloom now - lots of orange fireballs dotted around the garden:)

with the late daffs the orange is cooled a lot by the white outer flower petals - the contrast makes them look like a fried egg sunny side up from afar!

there will come many more orange flowers later in the year - I think of coreopsis, cosmos sulphureus, tagetes, dahlias of course - and a very "hot" contestant - the huge canna flowers! maybe there is some truth in the saying that the colours turn hotter with the weather? but - no flowers without some help - off to the garden I go (pricking out seedlings - a terrible job = decision between life and death for all those tiny plants!)

Show your colours - yellow

today the colour is yellow! there's no shortage of this during spring in ireland. there is the ubiquitious gorze (which flowers on and off during most months of the year...) - which I used for dyeing again yesterday. every spring I do acupuncture for my fingertips, by picking a potful of gorze flowers.... I really like the yellow it gives on wool and silk; though not as strong as the flowers themselves, but a nice lemony colour nonetheless. the astonishing thing about this is that the dried or frozen flowers or those, which have been standing around for a few hours, don't give this bright yellow! they do still dye - but the result is a golden yellow, very different from this! btw, the yarn on the left is the lace yarn from Wollpoldi in germany, the ball (well, what's left of it in the pic, sorry:)) is teeswater top - both on 10 % alum mordant.

of course most dye plants give a yellow, so here are a few more from my stash. the strong yellow on top is wool/silk with dyer's chamomile, the others are from yellow cosmos, heather and onions - but all 2nd or 3rd dips, where the colours loose the intensity a bit - and become very soft and easy to use with other colours. there are plenty more in my stash - those are just some that I could grab from the top.

as I said, there are plenty of yellow spring flowers, apart from the gorze. another plant that grows pretty much everywhere is the yellow primrose, with pastel yellow flowers and a darker yellow center...

this is not a wild plant, it's a corydalis lutea, with finely divided leaves and nice, trumpetlike flowers - that grows well in the shade here.

I left out obvious choices - I am sure someone came up with dandelion! or the yellow rubber gloves I use for dyeing... or the yellow duster... there must be plenty of household things in yellow, because it is a cheery colour. take the dishwashing liquid, the neon yellow text marker etc. but I am going to concentrate on garden and stash - if I can find the required colour:))

and no, I am not colour blind - I know this isn't yellow. it's a rather depressing khaki-olive green - on wool and soy silk. mordanted with 10 % alum as well (and treated with iron vinegar afterwards; it was even uglier when it came out of the dyebath first!) - and dyed with the previously described rhamnus frangula berries gone mouldy. the green is a bit better in reality - but not all that much! esp. not when compared with the lovely dusty blue I dyed with the fresh berries! I thought at first about overdyeing it, maybe with madder. but very likely the colour will muddy up even more - so khaki it is! maybe it's a good choice for the Laminaria shawl from knitty? seaweed can look this ugly:))

back to the garden until the rain comes in....

Show your colours - white

I have to admit that I took the pix yesterday - during late afternoon the weather was so nice, that I first picked a jug of gorze flowers (for dyeing of course) and then took the digi cam for a stroll around the garden. the problem now - as anticipated - how to choose one photograph. well, I can't, because there were plenty of white flowers around, so here come a few:
first of all, one of my favourites at this time of the year: the apple blossom, those are from a "John Downie". only white, when they open, as buds they have a very slight rosy tinge. we have a lot of different apple trees and they pretty much all have slightly different colours, when they blossom.

the second one is the epitome of modesty - some even classify this little daisy as a weed! not so in our garden, they grow all over the place and if we don't like them, where they grow - they get eaten:))

which is something not to be done with the following "white": the plant is called baneberry or Actaea spicata. the flowers are white, but not a flat mass of white, because the single blossoms are so frilly and fine. I like the look of the plant, I use the black berries for dyeing (though they don't produce all that many) - but I don't like the smell, because it has a slight "animalistic" odour to it! which is not really a problem, as the plant stays quite low - and I don't usually crawl through my garden on all fours:)

the last one is another "not pure white" - it's not called "Freckles" without reason. the white flowers have more or less pronounced violet freckles - but some are pure white. it's a very small viola, not rampant, that's why I grow it in one of my stone troughs (well, selfbuilt "stone" troughs...). my finger in the pic couldn't be avoided, because otherwise I'd have to crawl in between the dog roses to take it!

but I am not a textile nutter for nothing! I do like plants and my garden - but I also like my fibres/stash! another example for the fact that white is not always "white". this is a collection of white, i.e. undyed fibres, but there is a lot of difference between them.

there are white wools, silks, linen and cotton - off-white would match better? there are also man-made fibres, which look whiter: viscose, also banana silk (the fluffy mass in the foreground) and ingeo (made from corn) - but the purest white of all comes from the skein of polyester thread (front right)! which doesn't feel nice to the touch and won't dye easily - but is very useful for fixing antennae and stuff around the house (and no, it's not handspun - I like fibres and spinning, but not that much:)) the hanks of handspun cotton/wool and pure ramie look positively dirty against it.

if I remember correctly yellow will be the next colour - tomorrow!