I nearly forgot.....

.... to show you what arrived in the post for me today (apart from the new piecework and the new journal):

I am walking around as Luna Lovegood today! my niece has been trying out different beading techniques and when she showed a strawberry on her blog, I asked her why she doesn't make radish earrings like the ones Luna Lovegood wore in one of the HP books/films. I didn't expect to find a pair in my post:)) DS thinks I am slightly loony (very befitting!) - but so what? ok, age, shape and hair are more Hagrid than Luna - but never mind.  thanks Sandra - great fun:))

more pictures

as I said we had visitors = not much time left for textiles. but I did start on toe-up socks (Laidman's changeling in schoppel zauberball "berry") before they arrived - to show how to knit them for the sock knitting demo at the museum in castlebar. I managed the foot part, but knitting the cables while playing cards (ok, during the breaks, when others shuffled the cards:)) wouldn't have worked, so I finally started this dishcloth.

the rows start with only 20 stitches, perfect, if you have to put your knitting away after a minute or so:)) I actually managed 1 1/2 of them - which proves that we played cards a lot!

my acid green spring leaves scarf gained a few rows as well - but there will be a few more tv evenings left before it is finished. spinning was in short supply - one morning I dragged the Louet out into the sunshine, together with the big bag of Akita Chiengora - only to rush inside 5 minutes later, when a hefty shower came down:((

I did however finally take the pix of my not too successful attempt at irish solar dyeing. here they come:

the upper photo shows all of the results. the middle shows the stronger purple (no surprise as it was a gaywool dye, not a natural one),  but the added red dahlia left nice orange-yellow blobs in it. and the photo at the bottom shows the different yellows with fireweed and galium flowers - and the much stronger dahlia yellow/orange again. on the whole the colours aren't bad, though I had to help them along with heating them up on the range. I should have put the jars out during the sunny few weeks we had - I know, mea culpa. but I think solar dyeing works better in wamer climates:))

I also should have known better than to put brazilwood directly onto fibres - I'll have a hell of a job to pick the leftovers out, even though I already shook/picked out as much as I could after drying. some dyes didn't really show up at all: the (too old?) dried walnut hulls and the lovely "black" violets among them. well, another year, another try maybe?

for now I am back to "normal" dyeing: the rhamnus berries are ripening and I am going to pick the black ones for my first dyebath - on silk, where they give very lovely blue tones....

late colours

we had visitors and I am way behind with uploading colour pictures. instead of rushing around trying to snap whatever is missing - I just drop those that are missing - and continue with the one for this week (at least I think silver is the one!).

silver - isn't available in my garden and neither is it in my stash as a textile. ok, maybe one piece of grey, shimmery silk would match "silver", but when I looked around in my wool room, I realized that many of my tools show this particular colour - or at least parts of them do. on the left you see the hook of my ball winder, my fabric scissors, the spout of my sprinkler (used for wetting felt - or, horror - my ironing:)) and a metal container for cigars. no, I don't smoke. and I find the smoke from cigars even more revolting than the one from cigarettes. but the container (found in the recycling center) holds my felting needles, very useful it is!

these gadgets are just as essential to me - the clamps to fix my drumcarder (and the crank is visible in the uppermost part). the pins I use for making bobbin lace - and probably the most important gadget to me: the leader wire of my lendrum upright - in constant use, not to be missed! 

the colour green

I know, I know, I missed last week's light blue.. but the week for green is nearly over as well - so I am going to drop the blue. here comes green:

I do like green - out in the garden or elsewhere in nature. I don't really own any garments in stronger green (very dark bottle green is the exception, but that's rare, too) - I don't have shoes in green, I don't have a lot of green inside the house apart from living plants. for some reason green and outside go together for me. so here are three greens from my garden for you. the one on the left is called Lithospermum erythrorhizon, what a mouthful, eh? it's not a very showy plant with the tiny white flowers, but it's a dye plant! unfortunately  the roots contain the dye, not the top. they dye purple (well, at least the plants in japan do - I still haven't harvested mine, because I don't want to destroy the plant).

the top right one shows the very fresh leaves of an Indian Horse Chestnut (they go pure green, when they're mature). we grew them from conkers that we collected in Dublin some years back. and the funny "snake" at the bottom is the branch of a monkeypuzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) - monkeypuzzle, because even a monkey would be puzzled if he had to climb that scaly tree:)) it looks a bit weird - not really like a tree. I don't find it very beautiful, it looks like a dinosaur to me - but I saw some handturned bowls a while back and they were stunning! because the branches all sprout out at the same height in a ring around the main stem, a bowl has a single colour lower part - and dark "eyes" all around the top, amazing. unfortunately the bowls were too expensive for me - so I am stuck with an ugly tree in the garden:))

nothing much has been happening on the solar dyeing front - due to lack of sunshine really. getting the jars wet in the rain doesn't do anything for the dye takeup, so I started by putting one of the jars into a pot with hot water - inside. it's not really solar dyeing anymore, I know, but we're expecting visitors the week after next and I don't think they'll appreciate dye jars all over the house/garden.... and it doesn't use extra energy, because we light the fire for heating anyway, so it can just sit and heat up over night.

and tomorrow I'll be gone for the day, because the Connacht Textile Crafters meet at the museum in castlebar again. I am showing how to knit socks on 1, 2, 4 or 5 needles (joking really, of course the 1 is a circular needle - with two ends:)) - and I hope for reasonable weather, so that maybe we can use the marquee in the grounds and sneak outside if the sun comes out.....

off to ply some chiengora with alpaca!

ps: I forgot one very green near-garment here: the 3/4 finished birch leaves scarf I am still knitting! might not be mine forever though - could be that I don't want that much green around my neck after all, we'll see:))

instant release

this is not an advertisement of the tacky kind - sorry, didn't mean to mislead you:)) yesterday I finally started to fill my jars for solar dyeing. though the sun was a one-day wonder, today was grey and overcast from the word go.... (but still dry).

anyway, I heated a big pot of water with alum and started to layer things into the first jar. I had one big red dahlia head and some pelargonium flowers, also dyer's chamomile, light blue delphinium and a few fuchsia flowers. while filling all of that in, I suddenly remembered that I had a small bag of "black" violet flowers still in the freezer. I put them in, too and filled up with the water/alum mix. you can see in the upper two pix what I mean with instant release - the fresh flowers show no colour right after filling in the water, but there is already a bit of a purple "halo" around the frozen violet blooms! like India Flint wrote in her book: the plant cells are broken during freezing and release colour faster when used! (if you don't have her book, go and get it - it's brilliant for all kinds of dye ideas!).

the lower two pix show the jar about 2 hours after filling - apparently the dahlia flower is playing catch-up! it seems to me that this time I managed to buy a dahlia that dyes orange. after last year's failure with the dark red flowered one, which only dyed blah beige (and the loss of all but the dahlia merckii var. due to the harsh frost:((),  I went for two varieties with red pompoms and it seems to have worked!

off to fill two more jars - when I came back from town, I picked some galium verum flowers, some knapweed, some equisetum and 3 large stalks of willowherb. no more teeswater top to play with, so I go and raid my stash for something else.... I checked, but the solidago isn't in flower yet!

sand coloured? not quite....

...but when I sorted through some of the piles in my "wool room", I came across this sweater I made a few years back. well, it's a bit darker than normal sand - but I know that there are black sand beaches somewhere, so why not?:))

I made this sweater from handspun manx loaghtan and a naturally white blend from wool with very little angora in it. DS loves polar bears (as do I!) and asked for a special design, where the bears were chosen from pix he saw in the National Geographic. off I went with graph paper - and this was the outcome, back and front:

of course it's far too small by now, but when I asked if we could hand it to some other child, he didn't want to let it go. I am not allowed to give it away, but he is still thinking about having it felted and made into a pillow... until then it'll stay on the "to-do" heap in my room (together with many other things...) I suppose felting it shouldn't be a problem - but maybe time will solve that problem. so no beaches with sand from me - rather a winter sweater; the right thing for continental blog readers, who are melting away in the summer heat:))

no sand colours - yet....

I just saw that sand brown is the colour for this week - only, just now I have no idea where to get this. other than taking a boring picture of our building sand heap:)) but I have two days left - I might stumble across something more attractive...

I did however take other pictures. this is the second and third try to find a pattern for the poison yarn - but to be honest, I don't like either of them too much. the brioche at the bottom is soft, but somehow doesn't appeal to me. the stockinette looked boring, so I started to knit short rows... but that looks even worse. I think I'll put the yarn back into its box just now and keep going with the spinning.

this is a result I do like! a colleague from our spinner's group, Connacht Textile Crafters, offered to check out the stalls of Wonderwool Wales some time ago. she found some Jacobs "humbug"  top, which I started to spin into a fine singles a few days ago. the first 100 g are done. I finally did some navajo plying again and for some reason it worked much better than last time. I really like the yarn, it's not overly soft, so not a candidate for a scarf etc. - but maybe for the "Scheuzger tote" I saw in the preview for the fall knits?