More dyeing

I still had the dye 'liquor' (is that the term?) sitting in the pan from the other day so I thought I'd try a bit more of the Lidl yarn in what's left. As you can see it's come out much lighter - quite a pretty colour actually, the pictures don't do it justice - which I imagine is partly due to the dye having been fairly exhausted after the last effort and possibly also because the second skein wasn't mordanted. It'll be interesting to see how much it hangs on to the colour.

The pic below shows it next to the first attempt - look nice together don't they?

Twelve in twelve

Perhaps rashly, I decided to participate in a "twelve pairs of socks* in 12 months" knitalong thing on Ravelry (it's on the Yarn Yard group). I'm a bit slow - I reckoned without the hectic nature of the summer term, I seem to have spent half the month up at the Boy's school already. I suppose there will be less busy months so it'll even out, especially as sock-knitting is so eminently portable. Or will be when I remember to put something on the ends of my needles before my knitting gets flung in my handbag. At the moment I spend the first five minutes of knitting time picking up dropped stitches.. On the plus side, I'm getting much better at picking up dropped stitches!

I'm new to sock-knitting so I'm doing a very simple pattern this time around. When I get more confident I'm going to use a more fiddly pattern with some rather gorgeous yellow Yarn Yard yarn (good tongue-twister that). Also in the photo above is some lovely sock yarn my Beloved got me for my birthday. This is going to be fun. I wonder how many stitches I'll have dropped by the end of the year?

* or 24 odd ones!

Potions

It all started with some rather boring yarn I had lying around (Treviso from Lidl). Cat2 helped me wind it into a skein. Well, sort of anyway.

I mordanted it with alum first. I'd intended to try dyeing with dandelions as we had bucketloads a couple of weeks ago but by the time I'd got the alum the dandelions had been superceded by buttercups. So I stewed the three dandelions remaining in the garden in with a whole lot of onion skins, then let the wool simmer in what seemed to be onion gravy...

hung it out to dry..

And there we are. I am so ridiculously pleased with my first bit of dyeing. The skein behind shows what it was like before the encounter with onions. MrBorg is, naturally, mystified by my enthusiasm for dull brown yarn.

Birthday weirdness

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and my Beloved bought me this book (from my wish-list, he's not actually psychic!). It's a beautiful book, fascinating to read, inspiring and really pretty to look at. I was flipping through it just after unwrapping it and was rather spooked when it fell open at the start of the Shetland section and there was that little red-haired girl..

.. my old friend since, well, babyhood I suppose. Interesting that Fair Isle is so timeless that you'd have no way of telling from that picture that it was taken in the late 70s. I've rather lost touch with my friend so I've no idea if she knows she features in a rather classy knitting book! I know the picture was in the Shetland Museum Archive so I suppose it's entirely possible she doesn't know.