A Weekend of Clarity. . .

I've had a wonderful weekend with lots of time to ponder my crafting life   It really started on Friday morning when I attempted to sort out some of my yarn stash. I'd bought these large plastic clothes bags from Lakeland which I thought would be perfect to store some of my sweater quantities of yarn and then I could use the rest for other single skeins (the package contained 10 bags).  I thought I maybe had about 4-6 sets of sweater quantity yarn. Eight at the most.

Ahem.  I was wrong.  Turns out when you really start digging through all the baskets, all the boxes, and all the project bags that contain yarn, you find all sorts of purchases you had forgotten about.  I had enough yarn for at least sixteen sweaters, not including various skeins in twos and threes that I could combine for colour work or stripes.  In short, I need to go back to Lakeland for more bags.

I am a bit horrified at how much yarn I have.  This has sobered me up which is a very good thing with Yarndale looming.  I really need to be much more restrained.  I need to keep all this lovely wool in my head against all the temptations of more lovely wool that I know I'll encounter at the show.  I am not good at self-control but this experiment has really opened my eyes and I'm actually looking forward to a challenge of restraint.  The good news is that I've planned specific projects for almost all of the wool, so it will just be a case of casting on and working my way though it all.  For the next decade or so. . .

Saturday, I went over to the Wirral with my friend Sue, and took a six hour workshop on eco-dyeing at The Wild Dyery.  Below, I think is the madder plant which you use to get a reddish colour.  I was all excited to buy some of these plants and grow them in my garden until I touched the leaves which feel a little tingly/spiky. You certainly don't want to stroke them.  And the colour comes from the roots and can take up to four years to cultivate.  In the workshop we used natural madder powder which you can just order online.

It was a very well organised and enjoyable day.  Justine showed us this beautiful sample that she made showing how the addition of extra material such as iron, copper and soda can subtly change the colours.

We then got to make our own little swatch books with these silk squares. And spent the morning learning various shibori techniques to play with patterns on square bits of cotton.  

After lunch we all got to play and dye our own silk scarf.  I just love how different and vibrant everyone's turned out (mine's the one on top - I later took it off the line and had one more dip in the indigo so those lines of squares are now blue like the scarf in the bottom left.  Yep, I totally stole her idea because it looked so good).

Sunday I went off to York for the day, pottered around the streets in the morning and then met up with a lovely group of knitters who call themselves the Northern Knitting Powerhouse and had come from a number of different cities to have lunch, a couple of drinks and some good conversation.  Now, it may seem daft to travel two hours for a knit and natter group, but I really, really enjoyed the afternoon.  They meet once every two months and though I follow and communicate with several of them through ravelry and social media, there's no substitute for just getting together in person, eating good food, having a laugh and doing a lot of knitting.  For various reasons, I haven't been able to go to a regular knit group in Liverpool and I've really missed it. Plus, I got a lot of knitting time on the train, tried some Earl Grey beer, had some excellent fish and chips for lunch and some tasty mini Yorkshire puds with gravy for the ride home, so all in all it was a very productive day.

And I had a good conversation at the knit group about spinning.  I have tried for several months now to improve my drop spindling.  It's not getting much better.  And even when I have spun something I'm happy with, I'm really hopeless at plying.  I was toying with the idea of investing in a spinning wheel, but honestly, do I really have the time to learn yet another craft?  No I do not. I have a lot of knitting to do.  I'm actually fairly good at knitting and that is my main enjoyment.  I need to dig out my loom again as I really loved weaving as well (and it will use up stash).   I had lots of fun at the eco-dyeing workshop and can see myself giving it a go at home but in a very small way.  I have a lot of fabric in my stash and learning to sew my own clothes would be far more useful than learning to properly spin.  So that was a great weight off my shoulders.  I will use my fibre for felting instead.  One of the women in my workshop described how you could add it to silk scarves as an embellishment and then felt it. Perfect.

And if it's a choice of getting on a train, travelling to another yarn festival (I've already been to six this year!) and buying more stash, or going to another knit group in York, I think for the time being (Yarndale being the exception - but I really will be a model of restraint!) the latter will win out - at least until I have about five more sweaters finished.

Gwlana 2015 Part Two: Wanting to Turn the World Blue. . .

It was extremely grey and damp yesterday and my thoughts turned towards blue skies, cocooning and crafting, so it was a good time to reflect on some of the ideas/projects that came out of my recent Gwlana retreat.

I was so excited about all the different techniques and so eager to try them all, that I went a little crazy (read clumsy and haphazard) with my tea towel and napkins, instead of methodically trying to work out a proper pattern. The end result was that taken as a whole, each dyed piece of fabric didn't look that great, but there were little patches where I quite like the final result. These lines for example, were formed by wrapping the tea towel around a pole and then tying it tightly with cotton string.

What did turn out well were my individual solid charm squares in various shades of blue and beige.  So at about 10pm on the Saturday night as I laid everything out on the bed, I was inspired to start madly cutting up the best bits of my tea towel and napkins into squares to add to my dyed ones.  Originally intending to do a 40 square wall hanging, I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide on the perfect layout before realizing that many of my squares were just too pale to fit nicely with the tone of the darker ones.  In the end, I found a nice 5 x 5 combination that I was happy with.  It was now midnight and I really should have gone to bed but instead, I started hand sewing the squares together. This is the finished piecing and yes, I realize some of the squares don't line up that neatly, but somehow it seemed okay at two in the morning. At any rate,it's a great souvenir of the weekend.

The plan is to use my dyed cotton yarn to weave a backing and border for this wall hanging and then to quilt it.  I'm quite happy with my dyed scarf. Most of the other participants meticulously ironed theirs; I crumpled it up and stitched a few chevrons on the edges.  This photo isn't great at showing all the depth of blue shadows that resulted, but they are there.

On the Sunday morning, we all had a bit of a show and tell and I couldn't resist taking some snaps of the other participants's work.  It just goes to show the endless possibilities both of pattern and colour.

But see that cotton skein below in four different shades of blue?  I was chuffed when Alison asked me (trusted me really) to dye it for her.  She wanted four distinct shades; I'm going to do something similar when I set up an indigo dye bath in the back yard next summer.  Yes, I will do it!  It's so much fun.  I also love her napkin pattern - those white marks look like knitted stitches.

We were asked to bring a man's white dress shirt to dye.  Monday morning's class was all about turning a man's shirt into something more feminine by cutting away the stiffer parts around the collar, button bands and cuffs, changing the shape and reusing discarded bits. We also learned about the Japanese boro - the art of mending with decorative stitches.  I love the look of Sarah's shirt when she unstitched the darts.

Catherine used reverse applique on the back of her shirt, using bits of her silk scarf. I think it looks amazing.

Here's my shirt in progress. I shortened the sleeves and will use the dyed cuffs as tabs to keep the sleeves rolled up. I removed the stiff interfacing from the collar which I had dipped in the dye bath and I cut away part of the tail of the shirt at the back.  That material which is dyed the darkest will form a pocket.  I also added some darts on the front of the shirt and purposely made them visible.

This was a really fun project and I really need to finish it off - I should have the perfect work shirt for next summer's dyeing.

It was a great and productive weekend.  I met so many interesting and inspiring people from all over the UK, one woman from Minnesota and another from Switzerland.  And it was so refreshing to be able to take out the needles whenever I wanted; we knitted at breakfast, during workshops, at lunch, in the pub, watching Downton Abbey on Sunday night - my fingers actually were quite sore by the end of it, especially as I got quite a lot of knitting done on the train ride home too.  But it was so marvellous to be able to completely absorb myself in creativity and craft for five days and to share that enthusiasm with a group of like-minded obsessives.  The next Gwlana will take place in May 2016 - a different location and set-up, but it should be as equally enjoyable.  More information as it becomes available will be posted here.

Gwlana 2015 Part One: Mood Indigo. . .

I've spent most of this week recovering from last weekend's Gwlana retreat which was so amazingly inspirational and such fun.  My head has been buzzing with ideas and projects and since I was basically running on coffee, profiteroles and adrenaline most of the time, I've had to catch up on some much needed sleep before being able to process it all.

Gwlana, which is Welsh for woolgathering, is a series of annual retreats run by Brenda Dayne of Cast-On podcast fame. It's a four day retreat held at a lovely hotel in the heart of Pembrokeshire and you basically spend four days knitting, attending great workshops, knitting, eating, chatting with interesting people, knitting, eating, making friends, buying yarn, knitting, eating, and jotting down creative to-do and to-finish lists that ae far too long. 

This autumn's theme was all things indigo, something I've been really keen to learn more about.  The workshops included practicing Japanese shibori techniques, learning how to hand dye with indigo,  incorporating colours into your knitting, and making do and mending with Japanese boro stitching and repurposing old clothing. 

We spent the first day preparing all sorts of material for the dye bath.  In terms of fabric, we were given a goodie bag in hemp (which could be dyed), a cotton tea towel and set of four napkins, and a silk scarf. We were also asked to bring a man's white dress shirt from a charity shop and anything else relatively small that we wanted to dye.  I grabbed nine solid colour squares from a quilting charm pack in light blues and various shades of beige and brown.  Below are some of the techniques you can use to resist the dye - I tied material around a pole, scrunched it into odd shapes held with elastic bands, clamped geometric shapes to crisply ironed triangles, and went a bit free form with running stitch lines pulled tightly to create folds and gathers. 

And then we also got YARN!!!!!!  From left to right: a skein of superwash merino Aran, a skein of 100% silk, one of cotton, and a laceweight merino too.

We soaked everything in cold water overnight, and on Saturday, we made our way to the Village Hall where Caerthan Wrack (isn't that a fabulous name), of Triskelion Yarns and our resident dye-master, showed us how to set everything up. 

It doesn't look the most appetising, but just you wait. . .

The lovely thing about dyeing with indigo is watching the object emerge from the dye bath as a shade of yellow and then as the oxygen hits it, it starts to turn various shades of blue.  I could watch this alchemy all day long.

Honestly, how much fun is this? The photo in the bottom right shows how my different yarn fibres took the dye and the different intensity of colour I could get depending on the number of dips and how strong the dye bath was. 

Here is a shot of my dyed objects drying.  I particularly like how the tote bag turned out - I just dipped the bottom third in.

I went a little crazy snapping shots of everyone else's dyeing too - you can really see all the different shades that can be achieved, especially with the yarn.  You could go from the palest, almost seafoam green, to the deep midnight blue of the darkest denim.

And all of our shirts were hung outside in the sunshine to dry.  People passing by must have wondered what the heck was going on.



I hung my yarn up to dry in my hotel room overnight.  After soaking and rinsing several times to get the residual dye off, the colours do fade a little, but I was still so pleased with the end results.  The skein on the far right was an extra one of a Masham/BFL mixture that was naturally a rustic grey and turned into a lovely blue-silver after soaking it in the darkest dye bath.



Whew - and that was only the first two days.  I'll show you some of the further outcomes and works in progress in my next post.