And some more knitting

Hello universe! It's me!  Among the many things going on recently I finally got round to doing a bit of knitting with my plant-dyed yarns - about time really, I've been saying all along that I'd like to try some Fair Isle with my own colours. It's just a sample to try out the way the colours work together - the yellow (dyed with marigolds) turned out to be a bit strong and dominant really, and I think it probably would have a bit better with the horsetail yellow that's the yellow skein at the top in the picture above. However it was fun to knit - fun just to do a sample actually, knitting for the pleasure of knitting rather than to make a specific thing.

And the reverse is always kind of fun too!

It was an absolute pain in the bum to knit flat though - I've always knitted Fair Isle in the round, but couldn't find my DPNs, and the circ I found was too long for looping so I just thought I'd knit flat. The main area was irritating but do-able, but knitting the rib was so frustrating! I'm always astonished to see Fair Isle knitting patterns that are knitted flat - it's just making it harder for yourself. Yes, if you've never knitted in the round before it means you have to learn that first, but it's not difficult and so worth it when you come to do Fair Isle - you get to see the pattern growing before your eyes, and most importantly, you spot almost immediately when you've miscounted/been distracted by Doctor Who, and can rectify it straight away.

In other news, the Boy has just finished his Nat5 exams, which is a huge relief as they seemed to last forever and he'd got to the point where he couldn't see or even imagine beyond them (remember that feeling?). His last exam was yesterday and today was his last day of study leave, so although I was working this morning we were able to celebrate by watching two episodes of Doctor Who that he vaguely remembered but that I had Never Seen - how can that even have happened?!

more plant/wool interaction

I may have got the dyeing bug again! Following last week's effort I did a bit more reading and went on an expedition with Miss M to a) get some burn water to top up the pond (without falling into nettles this time) and b) collect some cow parsley to dye with. This is not as easy as it sounds - there are a squillion plants that look something like cow parsley (*shakes fist at umbellifera*). My plant book seemed to think that quite a few are uncommon in Scotland, but there still seemed to be a lot. I googled as well of course and found loads of websites telling you how to distinguish cow parsley from hemlock, and hemlock from wild carrot, and hogweed from Queen Anne's Lace, as well as a certain amount of confusion over which plant Queen Anne's Lace actually refers to anyway.

Anyway, we found a substantial amount of what we chose to believe was cow parsley, and it yielded a huge amount of really quite bright yellow. The skein on the right in the picture above is the 4-ply I used first, and then when that was done and the dye seemed far from exhausted I chucked in the last skein of aran weight and it came out just as strong. I'd left that one in overnight and by morning the dye liqor was clear so I'm guessing I really had exhausted the exhaust by then!

I should probably add, the 4-ply skein was mordanted with alum before being dyed but the aran weight skein was unmordanted so I chucked some alum into the dye bath with the wool and did a two-in-one. It'll be interesting to see if this affects the fastness.

It always surprises me how much dye you can get from of the most unlikely plants. There really wasn't a lot to the cow parsley, or whatever it was, we collected - just skinny dryish stalks and tiny flowers - yet it dyed two skeins a really strong yellow. It was the same when I tried dyeing with horsetails a few years back - I felt as if I were dyeing with a pile of dead stick insects there's so little to them, but I got a pale but strong yellow from them.

In addition to all that I also turned the two-toned skein from last week into a ball:

I want to start knitting this into something soon, I'm so curious about how it'll turn out.

And here it is while still in the skein with that other skein I did with the fuchsia bark and the alchemilla mollis, last seen drying on a door handle!

It looks quite beigey in that picture but in reality it's a soft, warm, (maybe buttery?) yellow. When it stops raining* I'd like to get all my naturally-dyed yellows lined up and try to get a photo showing the range. It's worthwhile doing anyway because I'm inclined to think 'oh, another yellow' rather than 'yay, another yellow!'.

Anyway that's what I've done with some of my spare time this week. Also den-building with Miss M, a school trip to Edinburgh Zoo, and a school disco. Think I'd quite like a snooze now.

* for today was the last day of term for the kids and therefore it is bucketing down out there. This happens every year. It's traditional.

Dye day

It's been ages again hasn't it? It's all been a bit frenzied here recently, with the kids' schools doing stuff and so on. But today for the first time in ages I fancied doing a bit of dyeing. Come to think of it, it's the first time in ages that I've had the time! Part of it is that Miss M is away on a residential thing with her gymnastics club, and the gentlemen of the family were going to build a shed for my mother-in-law (well, put together a shed, it was a flatpack thing) so this afternoon I had an unusually quiet Saturday afternoon stretching before me. One thing I wanted to do was dig up the docken sprouting in the front garden, and then it occurred to me that it would be nice to try dyeing with it.

With a quick look at Wild Colour (one of Jenny Dean's books) and a bit of googling, I found out that the tap root can be used for dyeing, but I fancied just trying the leaves. Of course when I dug the flaming thing up I realised that the tap root is enormous! In fact I bent my trowel trying to lever it up..
So I've saved the taproot and will try it another time.

There were loads of leaves so after a bit of leisurely winding of wool into skeins and a bit of mordanting, I got to the dyeing bit. The end colour was a pleasant enough soft yellow but I fancied messing around with an alkaline modifier and as luck would have it there was a bag of soda crystals in the cupboard under the sink. I draped half of the skein into the modifier and it turned a more mustardy yellow. It's not the most gorgeous colour really, but I really like the two tone effect and I'm looking forward to knitting it up and seeing how it looks!

I had a second smaller skein mordanted so I had a go at dyeing with fuchsia bark, mainly because I hacked back the Fuchsia of Doom a few weeks ago and had loads of twigs/sticks left from it with lovely soft papery outer bark. Note to Self of the Future though, it gives beige, don't bother again! So I chucked in some alchemilla mollis leaves and flowers to simmer with the wool, and got another yellow:

That's it still damp and drip drying on the handle of the back door to the garage so I'll have to check the colour properly tomorrow morning.

So it's been a day that has been both lazy and productive - pretty good!

Day 1: Still no flying cars.

There for your perusal is the Hogmanay onion-skin-and-daffodil dyed wool. 

As ever, a yellowy shade is almost impossible to photograph - in reality this one is rather more mustardy and rather less pleasant. However as a contrast colour in some kind of colourwork I think it'll work quite well. Maybe some stripes would look good. Hmm. I sometimes think I spend more time planning (or just day-dreaming about) future knitting projects than actually knitting them. This is completely normal, isn't it?

Today we have continued with our strategy of lazing around doing not much, which is quite nice, though the kids are possibly going a bit stir crazy. Certainly the bicker-o-meter went up a few notches today!

And I finally got round to having a piece of Christmas cake. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... very nice this year. At some point I'll try to blog the recipe so that when I find I've lost the printout-with-scribblings in 10 months time I won't panic. It was actually the recipe I usually use but for a smaller tin so I had to start by doing arithmetic to work out the proportions, which I don't care to repeat too often. It's funny, I honestly hadn't felt like eating anything as overtly Christmassy as Christmas cake until today. And it'll probably last me another month.

A Hogmanay post

So, another Hogmanay, and this year we're at home. I'm knitting my garter stitch square and watching Tudor Monastery Farm, while drinking ginger-wine and lemonade. And cursing people who are letting fireworks off early!

I've ended the year with a little Hogmanay dye batch - red onion skins, brown onion skins and a few daffodil heads. Bunches of daffodils have appeared in the supermarkets very early this year so I've had daffodils on my windowsill since Christmas Eve, which has seemed a bit odd but added a welcome splash of zingy yellow.  I didn't do a huge amount of dyeing this year, so it was quite nice to end the year with a bit. It's still drying on the radiator and the colour looks quite nice as far as I can tell by unnatural light - I'd like to think it's 'old gold' but it might be 'mustard'!

It's been a very wet, windy, mild December, so outdoors is windswept but not bleak. The Boy and I went for a damp walk yesterday to blow away the cobwebs and took pictures of this hedge:

Lovely colours but it was surprisingly tricky to get a photo that got that richness of colour.

The other day I took apart the kids advent calendars (I'm not one of these parents who insist on non-chocolate advent calendars - I remember getting picture-only ones when I was young and they were fun, but I also remember my first chocolate advent calendar and it was brilliant!) for the recycling. I hadn't noticed the detail the good people at Cadbury's had included in their knitting-themed Christmas chocolate range.

Look - the inside of the doors match the squares behind! Nice colours too!*

I'm not going to do a review of the year - there have been good bits and less good bits but I find New Year pretty arbitrary. And I know in Scotland we're all supposed to go mad for New Year but lots of us don't, and I've not been that keen on it for a long time - I mean, who wants to welcome in January anyway?  Ridiculous, pointless month (yes, I know I said it's pretty arbitrary - I never said I was consistent). The nights may be getting imperceptibly shorter, but it's still a long time 'til spring. Blimey, that's gloomy!  I'm really not :-D.  I'm quite happy to be sitting peacefully at home knitting and watching television.

So Happy Arbitrary Calendar Change to you all!

* No, I'm not sponsored by Cadbury's. *sigh*

things wot we 'ave been doin'

The trouble with having a little unintentional blogging break is that I find I have loads I want to talk about but I'm too overwhelmed by it to be bothered - besides which it is the school Easter break so I'm either rather busy staving off bickerfests or trying to prevent the kids from spending all day playing Minecraft or watching back-to-back episodes of Lazytown. I appreciate musclebound Icelandic men as much as the next woman but there are limits.

The first week of the holiday was great because we tootled up to the Highlands to see my mum and dad for a few days. The weather was lovely and Cairngorms National Park is pretty wonderful at any time of the year:

We were all impressed by this caterpillar.

Since we got back I've done a bit of dyeing, with daffodil heads this time, resulting
in this:

 Ah, yet another yellow! Nice one this time



And I've ripped back the green shawl I'd just started knitting because something had gone not-quite-right and it was bugging me:

So I've started again and now it's going better. She says cautiously.

And I thought I'd show you my little knitted bee.

He brightens up my spotty bag beautifully. I knitted him because Miss Mouse's class recently did a bee topic at school and we-the-parents were all invited in at the end of term to see some of the stuff they'd been doing. I'd offered the bee to Miss M to take in if she wanted but she declined - however she was delighted when I arrived with the bee on my handbag. I think it'll stay there, it makes me smile :-).

Following the crafty theme, I've also become hooked on the Great British Sewing Bee, despite (or perhaps because of?) being completely inept at sewing myself.  I do like watching competent people being competent.

And now, for Mrs Micawber, some of my egg-hunt clues. Apologies for terrible poetry!

'Finding eggs is hard, you'll agree/The next egg is with things that help Mama see' - the egg was hidden on my bedside table behind my contact lens solutions.

'The next egg is hidden from sight/ In a place that might be home to a knight' - in the Boy's old toy castle.

'Magical transport that comes when it's bidden/Is the place to find an egg hat is hidden'  - behind Miss M's Lego Knight Bus. This one had them stumped and I had to give them some fairly unsubtle hints in the end.

'The next egg is the cutest by far/ Find it where the small people are' - in Miss M's doll's house. I'd put gem stickers  and googly eyes on the foil for that egg to make it the 'cutest by far'.

And so on!

The widening gyre

A bit of Yeats for you there, because I'm still spinning and because Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, died this week, which made me think of the poem.

So, yes, still spinning. The doctor says it's labyrinthitis which is what I suspected.  It comes and goes. And is particularly bad in supermarket checkout queues! I think that's because that's the only time I'm actually standing still. The rest of the time I'm either moving or sitting down, and it's manageable then. In fact it's not really bad, I'm functioning, getting the kids to and from school, doing most of the usual things, though Powerhooping is out for the moment - the sight of all those hoops is just too much!  I've been using the computer less and for shorter periods of time which is why I haven't been blogging - I'm a s-l-o-w blogger,  it takes me a while to find the right pictures and write a post!

So what have I been up to? Well I did do another loaf of bread, following an actual recipe this time and it turned out ok:

 Then My Beloved made some of his wonderful oaty rolls using his usual method of haphazard measuring and, as far as I can tell, minimal kneading, and they were amazing!  Hmph.

 I've made choc-choc-chip cookies with Miss Mouse:

And apple and blackcurrant crumble just for me, 'cos nobody else likes it (but no picture of that because the ones I took looked too visceral).  Comfort food? Oh yes! It's been grimly cold with a really biting wind. I've just been watching the snow falling again. It's been snowing a bit every day for days - mostly tiny pebbles of snow, not hail because it's too light and soft for that, but not flakes either, more like very small polystyrene beads. Today it was back to real flakes though briefly. I'm not looking forward to going out to get the kids. This time last year it was like this, which was nice but weird.

Today I mordanted a skein of wool - that's the first mordant this year, we're getting to dyeing season, yay! I might even invest in a bigger pot so I can do more than one skein at a time.

And that's all for now. It's taken me two hours to write this post because it all got too spinny and I had to go and lie down in the middle, so if it's incoherent don't blame me, blame my inner ear!

Greenest

 Wool dyed with dyers chamomile (anthemis tinctoria), soaking in water.

 The same wool added to the slightly pongy black bean dye bath (black turtle beans soaked in cold water out in the garage for several days),

 The same wool after soaking for another couple of days out in the garage.

The same wool after washing and drying. It's green! Really green!

 The same wool shown with my previous Best Green, the drab one - photo taken with a flash.

For days after this I was waving the wool under the noses of my family saying 'Look at that! It's green!' That's how pleased I am!

doppelganger

I found the previous black-bean-dyed wool. That's it on the left. So despite the things I did differently, there's not a lot of difference - oh well! What to make with it though, that's the question..

I'll just include a gratuitous string shot, just for the sake of it:

Wound Up

That's 4-ply wool on a cone. I love the way it looks when it's neatly wound like that. Also string:

A new ball of string is a thing of beauty.

The 4-ply wool on the cone was about to be un-wound into a skein, with help from a small cat of course.

I do the skeins on the legs of an upturned chair and the small cat frequently finds this too hard to resist. She's sitting on the underside of the seat there if you can't figure out what you're looking at.  But eventually, with the cat untangled,..

a 54g skein of 4ply waiting to be mordanted (alum/cream of tartar) ,

 .. and finally immersed in a cold black bean dye.  This time I added a bit of bicarb to the soaking beans because that's what somebody on Ravelry had done, and I wanted to see if it made any difference to the colour - it didn't I don't think. I've put the last bean-dyed wool somewhere safe  - by which I mean I have no idea where it is. 

What is different this time is that the bean solution did smell (it didn't last time), not terrible but pungent and distinct, and also you can see in the picture that the dye bath was a bit frothy too.

 And the end result - another nice blue. I dipped one end into a soda crystal solution to see if that affected the colour and it did. Slightly. It's a little greener and a little paler, but not enough to show up in the photos, which is slightly frustrating.

 And now it's in the process of getting would up into a ball. Got a bit tangled there. As usual! 

A burst of colour (contains spider!)

Just because!

It was our wedding anniversary last week and my mother-in-law gave us a bunch of colourful roses. Roses are so much fun to photograph:

They're a cheerful bunch of flowers on my kitchen windowsill but when you zoom in they become all romance-novelly and exotic-looking!

We're well into autumn now and the rain continues to be frequent but we're getting the odd day or few hours of sunshine and blue sky. I love sunny days in autumn, I love the cool brightness - today was such a day and I went out foraging. The brambles are far from ready yet, but I got some rowan berries yesterday and hoped to get some more today so I can make rowan berry jelly, but there aren't that many rowans near us and the berries on the one I found, though plentiful were not ripe enough. I'll try again next week. It was nice to get out for a walk though and to get a few pictures of the colours:

Meet my spider. Almost every day there is a spider's web between the trampoline and the washing-line - it's a spectacular feat of engineering and art, and yet very often I forget and blunder through it, and the poor old spider has to start again.

I was quite impressed when I looked at this photo and noticed how many patterns the spider has used - see the flattened hexagons that look like chicken wire? I love the details that come out in photographs which I just don't pick up on in at the time.

Still in the garden, the insects are feasting:

The mint is flowering (pics above and below)

And my very small buddleia-in-a-pot (Buddleia Buzz) has flowered! I planted it last year so this should have been its first year flowering but it's been so wet and murky I wasn't sure it actually would manage it - then finally the flowers appeared..

..and so did the butterflies! All of my butterfly photos manage to look fake, as if badly photoshopped, but they're really real!

I don't know if anyone noticed the splash of yellow in the background of the first mint-flower picture, but that's my anthemis tinctoria (dyer's chamomile) which has given the most colour in the garden this summer - it's been brilliant, completely unstoppable and the hoverflies love it.  As there's so much of it I finally got round to doing another dye with the flowers:

Once again though I can't get a photograph that reflects the colour accurately - it looks quite buttery there but is actually a stronger, slightly harsher yellow (almost with a hint of mustard?) - but the pictures make me so happy even if they're not accurate. The one with the sun on the wool is when I'd just rinsed it and had hung it over the kitchen tap to drip dry for a few minutes. I've got a very sunny sink obviously..

I'll finish with a poppy just for a bit of red!