part two

I don't know why blogger doesn't want me to keep going, but I'll try my luck with a 2nd post.

very close by is another manufacturer, "Studio Donegal". they use the yarn produced by Donegal Yarns to weave fabrics for all kinds of projects, garments, furnishings etc. they do have a shop - and lots of lovely yarns for sale, too. we were given a tour here as well, and we found out that not only do they weave with the tweed yarns, they also produce their own, to be woven into gorgeous, multi-coloured fabrics. I only took one photo - this is the spinning mule, that produces the yarn on a more old-fashioned machine than the modern spinners of Donegal Yarns (and into quite a differnt yarn). it reminds me of lots of little spindles, which all produce a yarn at the same time, and that's what it really is. the part in front, where the spindles are attached, moves quite far out and draws out the fibres, then twist is added and the part moves back again, while the yarn is wound onto the spindles. lots of handspinners - all packed into one machine:) this was invented because during the industrial revolution the output of all the handspinners simply wasn't hight enough anymore to keep up with demand.

 

 

like the big spinning machines of Donegal Yarns the spindles work with pencil roving. on both sides of the machine there are "cheeses" that form during winding, which don't end up on the main beam. if they are nice and tidy, they can be used as a predrafted yarn like this. there is no twist added - so I can either choose to draft it out finer - or I could let it run into the wheel to make a chunkier yarn. I found two of those "cheeses" in the shop and couldn't resist them. normally this would be a waste product that goes back into yarn production, but every now and then nice looking packs can be found in the shop. they aren't "cheap", but I think they're worth their price, because they are special. Studio Donegal doesn't sell this yarn in the shop (at least I didn't see it there), they do sell skeins of Donegal Tweed there though, and lots of their other products. have a look at their website, lots of eye candy to see:) so I can make a really special yarn with this pencil roving - and I hope for more, but maybe I should spin these two first?:)

we also watched handweaving on the upper floor, where again I was so busy watching that I forgot to take out my camera (good thing I am not a photo journalist:). but you can see a handweaver at his loom on their page (and on their card in the picture above). and we checked out the cutting and sewing room, where no pictures were allowed, for obvious reasons.

 

on the whole I found it very interesting, to see where all this yarn is produced. it's a long drive, but the scenery has been very beautiful and we were lucky with the weather as well. after all this fibrey stuff we were very hungry and thirsty and raided the cafe of "Donegal Craft Village" first of all. hmmmm, lovely food and cakes and good coffee/tea as well - really recommendable for hungry crafters:) there are several small houses, where different crafters can show their trade and sell their goods. when we went, there was a painter, a metal worker, a wood turner, a potter, a glass maker (lampwork) and a weaver. quite interesting to see, too - esp. because we were able to see how things are made. I bought that small pottery "jug" in the picture above. I plan to attach it to my wheel, when I spin linen - to wet my fingers in between. of course I am a sucker for celtic patterns anyway....

 

on our way home we passed "the crafter's basket", where the poor bus driver was forced to take another stop, while we all flooded out of the bus and into the store.... the ladies in the shop probably already thought about going home, when we raided their shop in their final hour:) here's my haul:

I finally found some freezer paper, so I bought what was left of the roll:) and some buttons, some mill hill beads in christmassy colours, some glitter yarn, a bit of glitter - and a small acrylic block for stamping.... 

fabric stiffener, several balls of green yarn to crochet a christmas tree, some white cotton for snowflakes, some ribbon, printed like a measuring tape - and two balls of rico cotton, which I need to crochet add-ons for a t-shirt.

 

and a large panel of "12 days of christmas" fabric - which I'd like to work into a simple wall hanging. and just now I realized that I must have forgotten to take pictures of the fat quarters of christmas fabric I bought - overwhelmed by all the stuff maybe?

of course I took some knitting with me on the bus (6 hours of driving can't just be wasted!), but when I came home I didn't really like the pattern so much anymore, so I frogged it all and started again.

I doubt that they read my blog, but if they do: thank you to Chris from Donegal Yarns and Tristan from Studio Donegal for their tours and patience in explaining their work to all of us. and thank you to the poor bus driver, who was very patient and helpful all day long (and probably glad to be back home again in one piece:).

 

 

 

solution

a bit delayed - but here comes the solution to the riddle of my last post. yes, those weird things are yarn cones - lots of them....

our group, the Connacht Textile Crafters, did a trip 2 weeks ago, up north to Donegal. the famous Donegal Tweed yarn is produced here:

unfortunately I didn't take pictures outside the factory, but you can find more details on their homepage, www.donegalyarns.com.

 of course you need fibres to make yarn - lots of it. some come in huge, white bales - others are already dyed, in single colours....

 to end up in blends like this. lots of little nups and locks that make up the tweedy yarn Donegal tweed is famous for.

they dye the stuff, too - in slightly larger batches than mine:) the fibres are pressed into large "kettles", and apparently dyed under pressure (like a pressure cooker really). no stirring involved...

this is the stage before the carding - where the fibres are pre-mixed. the metal "bin" on top blows air in, so that the small, loose fibres mix...

...before they end on a huge drum carder. unlike on my household sized drum carder you don't have to pull out your batt and start again to blend it more.

instead the batt moves from roller to roller to form a large, continuous batt ...

... like this. I wish I had a few metres of this! not necessarily in orange though.....

eventually the batt is pre-drafted into finer pencil rovings, which are wound on large beams like this. at this stage they look like lots of flat balls, sitting side by side on the beam.works in purple, too!

which is moved to the spinning machine. each roving is fed into the spinners ...

.. and ends up as yarn on those large cones.

or those - couldn't resist them because they are purple! I could knit so many purple sweaters out of this load....

the yarn isn't finished yet, it contains oils and has to be washed before winding it on cones again. this lady here can double-tie one whole skein faster than I can tie skeins in one spot on my niddynoddy... but she has about 30 years of practice:) for some reason I didn't take a picture of the washing area.... but the yarn runs automatically through different large tanks, where it is washed and rinsed - and of course dried again.

eventually the yarn ends up on those 2 kg cones for sale. I found the whole tour around the mill very interesting - our handspinning, really. just on a very large scale! this is a factory, a wholesale company, no shop with shelves full of wool to buy....

 

for some reason blogger doesn't want me to show you the rest of the pix:( off to another entry....

 

 

preview

no, not books this time (it's getting closer to christmas, but not that close!)... our group, the Connacht Textile Crafters, went on a trip last tuesday - guess where:

we saw this: 



 ...and just around the corner there was this:

of course we saw other things, too:) I did take some more telling pictures, but I'll show those later.

 

as much as I love eating - when I do so in a bistro or restaurant, I never remember to take photos (too greedy, I suppose:). which I should have on tuesday, because we had some lovely food. all I can show you is a photo of something we had a few days ago:

hm, blackberry crumble. some of our fruit trees look empty - and not because I picked everything! strawberries were pretty good, but raspberries are next to non-existant (only the yellow variety has produced some, but not a lot). but blackberries? I don't think I've had a year that good since I came! they are big, ripe and very tasty - or at least they have been until yesterday. we had a lot of rain last night and strong gales - so maybe the overripe ones have dropped already. I spent my evening walking up our road and picking - 4.5 kg of blackberries. a small amount will go into a blackberry almond pie today, but most of them will end up in my steam juicer later. I am not terribly fond of blackberry jam, because I don't like the seeds so much. but I do like blackberry jelly, yum! I only make a small amount immediately and finish the rest from juice bit by bit. which of course means that we could still use it in another way - e.g. hot blackberry juice with a bit of lemon, a drop of rum and hot water - like a "grog", but fruity! or blended with brandy, very tasty (with a bit of brown sugar). if the wind calms down a bit I might go for another browse, but we'll see..... most of the time over the year I curse the overgrown road - but at this time I love it, because I only have to step out the front door to go picking:)

 

of course I've done other things - textile stuff. I had planned to use a bit of my sockwool remnants for hexipuffs. but a friend of mine steadfastly refuses to learn knitting in the round (she claims she can't do it...) and when I found the same project in crochet in ravelry I thought I'd give it a try.

it's simple, just sc (or dc in uk) in the round. a few increases, later a few decreases, that's it. but to be honest - I'd rather do it in knitting:) she can have the pattern!            

and yes, I have done quite a lot of knitting and spinning, too. some of it was the dyed yarns and fibres from my last entries. I also started a moebius on the bus trip - but decided I don't like it too much, so I ripped it yesterday morning - to start a different pattern with the same yarn. and I brought something from our trip - see next entry:)

 

in the garden I've been collecting seeds. nero di toscana kale, some dahlia sp. and quite a lot of seeds from the purple lupin I bought in june. this plant was a brilliant buy - 4 euros for a big plant that has been producing gorgeous flower stalks non-stop from the day I bought it! plus lots of seeds on the side... I wanted to try dyeing with lupins, and hope that the strong purple will yield colour as well. but for this I have to grow a few more than just my parent plant! if anybody wants lupin seeds - beep (or my garden will grow nothing else next year:).

I do find the pods quite interesting (and wish I had a better camera for this!)

each seed had a "room" of its own plus a nice cozy lining to keep it safe. and when the pod is ripe it magically splits open and shakes its inhabitants out of their cozy apartments.... but I won't leave it to chance, I collected all the seed pods so far, and will only leave the last stalk to try self-seeding, too.

 and now I am off to dig out the steamer - the blackberries are so juicy that I can't leave them for more than a few hours before using them!

a grey day....

that's what we're having today. though I have to admit that this year they are few and far between. the last two summers where really yucky, but this year is much improved. ok, I thought that 30 deg. C was a bit much, but that only lasted about 2 weeks - since then it has cooled down quite a bit, we've had some rain, but not many days have been totally wet and grey! the forecast isn't too bad either, but that can change quite quickly here! we've had forecasts of a lovely azores high - and all we got were grey, muggy and sticky days instead:)

 

enough of the weather - I've finally emptied the box of the pre-soaked dyestuff. high time - I discovered a bit of mould on a piece of silk top, which I had to discard. alum mordanted fibres can stay damp for quite some time before mould develops, but because I used acid dyes I only soaked in water/vinegar mix! so I did a dye marathon and this is the result:

 first I used up some of the gaywool dyes I had left over in jars - they don't last forever once dissolved! I just spread out some silk noil (photo below) and some kid mohair locks in my roasting tin (esp. for dyeing). because there was still some space I also added some soysilk top. I filled up with water and added the liquid dyes on top. everthing was covered and stayed in a hot oven for about 35 or 40 mins. the dye take-up is very nice on the mohair locks, more muted on the soy silk (no surprise, because it is apricot coloured anyway in its natural state)...

 the silk noil however didn't take it all that well - probably the disorganized mess was pressed together in some spaces from getting rid of access water before dyeing. on the other hand I am not too fussed about that because I have to card it all anyway before spinning it. it'll blend together, with some areas more pastel coloured than others, no problem. the only difficulty was drying it properly, because I couldn't hang the mess up! as messy as it looks right now - once it's carded it spins up into a nice yarn, uneven, a bit like terry - but with lots of structure and a nice, slightly grainy grip.

I also dyed this silk cap - in a very fiery red, which will be used as ply for the red/yellow merino top from my last entry. in fact both are spun up - and I am going to ply later tonight (probably I won't have enough of the red, so I'll ply some of the merino with itself). not a yarn for shrinking violets:) the dyeing was done in a microwave bag: I poured in some yellow at the bottom, added the damp silk cap and poured in some red. because the bag had to lie flat, the red overdyed the yellow nearly everywhere, but that's ok. adds a bit of zing:)

 

this is the second sock blank I knitted. I decided to use some of the food dyes - just slightly diluted - to paint a rainbow. well, ok, I didn't paint it so much, I poured it. that's why the stripes are so uneven:) but I think the socks will look nice, when knitted up! because this is only a bit more than half of a skein, I'll have to add another colour for ribs, heels and toes - I am going to raid my stash for that. when the yarn is wound into a ball, it looks far less "offensive"!

then I dyed all of my hankies - in shades of purple to aubergine to nearly black. I love spinning them up, but I also wanted to try to knit with the drafted hankies - as soon as my gardening hands are a bit less rough:) spinning silk isn't really fun, when all the fine fibres stick to your hands.....

and no, I didn't dye white - this is a skein of cashmere/himalaya fibres, which I spun using the long draw - so soft and cushy! I don't know what this will be, but I'll have to spin up another 3/4 of a pound anyway:)  

 this is what happens when you don't check your sock skeins! I saw that the skein was only tied in one place after I soaked it - and I thought: ok, I'll just have to be careful. if I hadn't been too lazy to retie - I'd have saved myself about 4 hours of clearing out this mess:( because of course the one and only tie did split! anyway, I have a nice parakeet coloured skein now, so the work was worth it after all.

more sock yarn: less bright colours on the left, the "brother" of the parakeet yarn above - and a small skein of sock wool with silk (which I like best, but of course I only have 50 g:(). 

another odd skein - it was wound into a very long and narrow skein! dyeing was no problem, I just have to be careful, when I wind it into a ball - to avoid something like the mess above:)

the green yarn on the right is a skein of handspun, I think merino, but I am not sure. I added some yellow and blue spots before I put the skein into the green dye bath - and I do like the uneven green, though I haven't got any plans for it - yet. the green is very luminous - I wish I had a bit more of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also spun some of the dyed fibres from the last post - this is the "moody jungle" teeswater. the original is less grey, greener in colour, but I like it very much. the question is what to use it for - maybe I'll use it for weaving squares with my weavette? it's a chain-plied 3 ply anyway.  

as I said, the heatwave is long gone - and of course my "solar" dyeing couldn't stand outside forever (in fact I discovered small mouldy areas in one of the jars!), so I brought them all inside and helped it along by standing the jars in a pot full of water for an hour or so. mind you, no strong boiling, just so that the jars get a bit more heat. the colours are all very different. meadowsweet flowers are the main ingredient in the strong, bright yellow on the left. the more golden tone in the middle is down to dahlias and crocosmia flowers and the green on the right came from dark red and dark blue aquilegia blossoms. the "in between" yellow above has a slightly green tinge here and there from tansy, but the dyer's chamomile has given the main colour, I'd say. I have 200 g of each of the colours, but I think I might overdye some of the yellows, because I still have yellow tones of teeswater in my stash - and there's only so much of it I can use! greens however... are a different matter:)

 

so now my box of dyeing utensils can go into storage again for a while. the problem with all those fibres/yarns is that I want to try pretty much all of them at once. I finished the first sock with the "moody jungle" silk sockwool, but now I want to start one of the other yarns. starteritis - I can see a lot of 2nd socks coming up during winter:) I also started the Argenteuil stole yesterday. because I have much more yarn than given in the pattern, I added a few stitches. I think I have about 320 or thereabouts - quite a long row, but the lace pattern only runs over 4 rows and is easily memorized, so it'll be the perfect tv project. off to a mug of tea and some more knitting.... 

results so far

I've been dyeing a bit more ... not much, just a skein here and there, to use up the pre-soaked stuff in bags that's still cluttering up the kitchen. the box doesn't seem to empty at all!

 I dyed some green (on the left) to go with the first batches of alpaca/silk blend I did at the demo. I think I can start winding them into balls soon, because my fingers itch, whenever I come close - I'll definitely start knitting that stole as soon as I get my pattern back:) I also put in two balls to use up leftovers, one is the shortest skein in the middle, the other the more purplish one to its right. the darker reddish purple skeins to the right are 4 bourette silk skeins, which took the colour beautifully, but still have an ugly smell. not sure how to get rid of that, maybe it'll go after washing it in the machine, when knitted up? and no, it's not the usual silk scent, it smells.... like a cellar:)

the skein on the right isn't dyed at all. it's thick and thin spun from ashford merino tops in purple/lilac and blues, plied with fine lace merino in very dark aubergine. and I had to hurry to get the skeins off the wall, because the neighbour's cattle became veeeery interested in the stuff on the wall - and came running over to investigate!

 those are two skeins of regia sock wool with silk that I dyed with the leftover dyes of the teeswater "moody jungle". nice colours, more blue and less khaki/green in real life. I'll start knitting those as soon as my current socks are finished. the single ball in the background has been overdyed twice. the original was a pale blue-grey dyed with alderbuckthorn berries. then I tied the skein off with pieces of flimsy plastic bags and overdyed with the leftover "moody jungle" green. but I didn't like the lack of contrast, rather boring. so I sprinkled some "crabapple" red crystals (gaywool dyes) over the skein here and there, when still damp and steamed it once again. with the addition of the red the green is far less pronounced and I also like that the red is quite irregular. I am looking forward to knitting these socks, because I have no idea how the colours will spread across the socks!

 

this "testing out" of how a certain layout of colours on handdyed sock yarns turns out is something that I started working on recently. every time I start a pair of socks I measure out how many cm of each colour are dyed  onto the yarn (even with commercial ones). for example with this purple/blue - yellow yarn, which I partially dyed with dahlia flowers and then partially overdyed with dark purple. about 30 cm are yellow, the rest of the 1.50 m skein is purple or yellow/overdyed purple. this has resulted in an interesting pattern: first (on 72 sts) the yellow spirals quite strongly. by the time I am down to 70 sts the spiralling has stopped - and is resumed when I decrease down to 68 sts. the rest of the leg has yellow spiralling around - but right in the middle some kind of irregular star or comet has formed! and the brownish areas (yellow overdyed) look a bit like the lighter halo around the star. I am going to keep notes for a time to eventually be able to plan a certain effect, when dyeing my yarn. if I had pre-planned this I'd have done a smaller ball just purple, so that I could have knitted the sock heel and gusset in single colour and resume the spiral pattern on the foot. unfortunately I hadn't planned the effect, so the heel has some yellow "flecks" now. the pattern isn't really one - I just purl every stitch that's yellow on the needle.

 

off to finish the first "starry night" sock - I have to hurry, because I can't wait to start on the stole and the "overdyed with red" socks!

the results...

..of messing around with a lot of colour:)

 

as I said I was going to do a demo on dyeing with acid dyes for our textile crafters group. we went in early yesterday and set everything up, but as usual I overestimated what I can do in a few hours - and brought far too much stuff. well, I guess it's better than running out of material after an hour or two...the meeting is only from 10.30 to about 3, but it looked as if I was going to move out:)

 

anyway, I had prepared acid dyes in 1 % stock solution, but also brought some gaywool dyes and some gooddall's food colours (which I didn't use after all). I had also pre-soaked most of my yarns in water/vinegar solution, so that I could start dyeing straight away. only when I packed my stuff for the day, I realized that I had mostly reds of the gaywool dyes, so I asked a member of our group to bring a few more for me... (can't have too many colours?:).

 

I started with two-tone balls - a very easy thing to do, altough it's always a wobble between having tidy balls and little colour inside - or wobbly balls and better colouring. I think I managed alright this time (which is a good thing, because I brought everything - but my niddynoddy and ballwinder:().

I didn't exactly match the half and half spread, because I didn't use the flat roasting tin I normally use for this way of dyeing. the height of the pot made it difficult to estimate the amount of dye needed to only dye half of the ball (or a bit less). so I ended up with a lot more reds/pinks than green, but that turned out to be good after all. when I wound the damp balls off into skeins, I saw that there are lighter spots, but no area was left undyed (the base yarn was light grey). I then used the same green (peppermint from gaywool; the red is garnet) to inject into an injection-dyed ball of white yarn. plus some of the red - when something happened that never happened before to me: the needle of the syringe flew off and didn't only leave me with spots on the t-shirt, but also on some of the people close by! luckily it was the green and not the red - it washed out of my t-shirt fine later. because I didn't want to risk any more accidents I put the ball into the leftover garnet dyebath - and ended up with the much lighter skein at the bottom.

 

 I had also prepared some previously dyed skeins, of which I didn't like the colours so much. this was dyed with leftover brazilwood (to make a light pink for the "ouch" granny's face...), the real colour is slightly more peachy, but too dark for a white-haired granny, so I tied areas off with binliner stripes and put the skein into the same garnet dye bath. not sure that I like it much - but I guess I can use it in a pair of socks with some other colour.... or maybe I should add a bit of the peppermint green from above to the lighter areas? not sure yet...

 

I wound a very long skein (2.40 m) of sock wool with silk to dye larger areas - nice for blocks of colour in socks etc. I used three 500 g yogurt pots and filled them with three colours, red, blue and violet. each pot was stuffed with 1/3 of the skein and then left until the colour spread to cover all areas (helped along with a bit of "spooning" by me:). I can't say that I adore the colours, but maybe I can make something like "stained glass window" socks, together with some anthrazit or black wool? a bit of yellow and a bit of green with it and bingo - I'd have a parrot:)

 

after lunch I dyed some top, merino this time. I just added yellow and red in stripes on presoaked merino, that I had laid out on cling film. I massaged it a bit to mix the colours at the edges. I'd say it will spin into a marled yellow-orange-red yarn - which I call Phoenix for now.

 

I had planned to work with sock blanks for some time, so I knitted two (only had time to dye one, though). I measured how much yarn I'll need for one row of a sock and knitted a strip (with doubled up yarn, to make 2 indentical socks) of that width. I used two sunsets for inspiration - not quite so easy, because I had to try to soak the knitting through into the stitches, but not add too much dye so that it doesn't run into other areas and thought that it worked out ok. I wanted to knit another pair of picture socks, with the sky colours as background and the silhouette of the tree in black for the sock leg. I'd say the rest of the foot will be all black, without pattern.

 

unfortunately when I unravelled the knitting this morning, I saw that the dye didn't quite penetrate the knitted stitches everywhere (= knitting more loosely next time?). I thought at first that I might go over some light patches by skeining the yarn and spreading it out to paint over. but I think it would be better to knit up the socks first and overpaint, where it's needed, once I can see where exactly the colours lack depth. I can put my plastic dummies inside for this and stuff clingfilm inside for steam-fixing.

 

my personal favourite of the dye results is this: teeswater top, which I braided loosely, laid out in a spiral and dyed by dabbing colours on first; green and blue. I then added violet and red into the blue areas with a pipette. the yarn is a good bit darker in real life - and I call it moody jungle (would be very fitting for my garden, too:). I can't wait to spin this - finely and probably chainplied, maybe for sock yarn? I am tempted to dye more, but I mixed several colours for the green and I am not sure that I can match this again... that's the downside of playing with colour and not noting the ratios!

 

I still have to either dye a good lot of presoaked fibres and yarns or dry the lot for some other time! but I will definitely dye two more grey balls and one white that I have prepared. the idea came to me yesterday that maybe I could dye the red/green yarns from the "two-tone" session to knit my own version of Argenteuil, a pattern that came out in "the knitter" recently. I will add more and darker green to the next two grey balls, plus some garnet. and the white ball will have very little green, a bit more of lighter garnet and an overall "rosy" tone. the pattern starts with the darkest colour mix, changes between this colour and the next lighter one by working 2 rows each for a while and so on. at least that's the idea - I just have to match the colours to that - and get the pattern back, which was borrowed by another member of the group:)

 

I do like dyeing, but yesterday evening I was quite glad, when everything was done and packed up again. and I will enjoy our next meeting at the end of september, when I will follow somebody elses demo! but before that we'll do a trip up north to Donegal, to the woollen mill, where the famous donegal tweed yarn is produced. I already started a project list to indulge in some of their yarns when we're up there! I hope there's enough space on the bus for a dozen yarn fans and their shopping bags:)

pot of gold?

if there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, it must have been right in the field across our road yesterday:) or maybe it's been on the other end - no idea where that was because I stood in my doorway to take the picture above... still, the rain had nearly passed and we had a lovely sunset. for some reason this happens quite a lot here. either we have a lovely morning and often the afternoon turns ugly. or we have a very wet day, but towards sunset the clouds are gone and the sun peeks through.

 

anyway, after the long dry spell the garden is looking much greener and happier again! there's only so much I can water and the rest has to doddle along somehow, fending for itself. right now the crocosmias are starting to flower and I just love their fiery red (no wonder they're called "luzifer"!) in contrast to the green around.

they are extremely reliable bloomers, even yucky weather for weeks doesn't deter them. they look like freesias when they flower, but just before the flowers open, they look a bit like a reptile to me - the tail of a rattle snake?

 

the perennial sweet pea is another show. unfortunately they tend to grow into everything, so I have to cut back some areas or they'll choke the shrubs behind them. but the rest of them are flowering like mad - not as fiery as the crocosmia, but they work well with the rugosa roses in pink and white, which grow beside them in the front garden. unfortunately they have no scent whatsoever. just like the crocosmia, but at least the crocosmia flowers seem to be chock full with nectar - which I only found out when I picked them and ended up with very sticky fingers.

 

even though I have so many plants in the garden, I fill some window boxes along the front of the house each summer. I just love the blues of lobelias - and the cheery yellow of the sanvitalia. they are sold as annuals, but this plant has overwintered quite neglected in the window box and with one dribble of tomato fertilizer it's gone off at full speed again a few weeks ago. this lasts until the frost - small sunflower faces that make me smile every time I look at them:)

of course I started a bit late with my solar dyeing - I couldn't find my large gherkin jars for some time. eventually I dug them out and filled them with teeswater top. the blue comes from frozen dark red and blue aquilegia flowers. which I had frozen (it makes the dye really flow out of the flowers, as soon as they are covered with water). for contrast I added some dyer's chamomile. in the left jar there is some of that, together with some black violas and  some tansy heads with buds at the bottom.

 

all in all I have 800 g of top in those jars. the right one is filled with meadowsweet, dyer's chamomile and some dahlias plus a few crocosmia flowers (it's a first, I haven't tried those before). on the left there are more orange dahlias and  a smaller amount of frozen black violas... I think I might have to wrap it in black plastic, because the weather has turned cooler and the jars don't really get very warm like that, even when the sun does come out! if all else fails and the summer turns cold and wet again - I'll bring everything inside and heat it up gently in my old electric canning "pot".