Wensleydale Socks: Or: How I learned to face prepping a long lustrous fibre.

Well ofcourse socks (for husband), and ofcourse plant dyed by me. And a new woolly fibre adventure: Wensleydale.
Wensleydale Yays: long lustrous fibres
                             lustre brings out the colours beautifully
                             takes up the dye magnificently
                             highly local to me (bought this fleece at Masham Sheep Fair)
                             hard wearing fibre, yet soft and silky (good for socks...)
                             is an incredibly beautiful fibre, with it's long curly locks...

Wensleydale Boo: Prep! Actually this is not all bad, BUT it takes a long long long time to do.

Prepping Wensleydale: You must wash it carefully, and slowly. It kind of matts often anyway before you even get it off the sheep. Natty dreds indeed. Be GENTLE.
Dye it really slowly and gently (see above..)
And then there is the fibre prepping bit... Wensleydale is too long for a drumcarder OR conventional carders. It will wrap right around your drumcarder and cause you much to curse about, like a bent awl. Those gorgeous fibres can be over a foot long...They also need to be teased apart (hand picked) anyway, before any more prepping can be done. If you wish a  textured yarn, maybe with some gorgeous curls pointing out, just do this much prep, and have lots of fun spinning it. If, however, you wish to spin for socks for your husband's birthday, you need to open those locks further, so you can spin a lovely straight yarn...
I flicked the locks open with a small carder, although many spinners use "flick carders" for this task. More like "combing" the fibres, half on and half off the carder. DON'T fold the fibre (unless you want difficult to draft lumps). It is a far remove from making a rolag, you are just aligning the fibres in a roughly parallel way, and getting rid of any snarls and knots you can.
I took this long and involved process as a chance to play around with blending the colours of some of my plant dyed Wensleydale fibres. I chose a slightly limited palatte, in the blue, yellow, brown spectrum (hmmn, don't normally use "brown" and "spectrum" in the same sentence, but it's a metaphor. I am a dye poet...). I thought "combine as many colours as I can get away with for a manly sock...". Greens and oranges and greys sneaked in. I had a great time with colour, trying out colour blends I wouldn't normally.
Something that seems to be important to me when blending colours in a multi hued arrangement is to have "quieter" areas - greys, paler colours, and "louder" ones with more saturated and intense colours. It works like an abstract painting: how you place the colours and their tones together in the piece gives the eye places to rest and reflect, and places where it is having a visual adventure. ( I know this seems like a lot for a couple of  humble socks, but honestly, these things MATTER to me...(sort of) if you're gonna do it, do it the right way for you....) Ofcourse it is a debatable point whether or not a visual adventure is also a soul adventure, but I know where I stand on that discussion.

After much prepping, the fibres were spun up and chain plied back on them selves. I didn't, after all that careful blending and ordering, want the colours to be muddied by careless (some might say "random") plying, as might occur in a 2 or 3 ply. It has to be 3 ply. We are talking socks, here. A chain ply does, ofcourse, give you a faux 3 ply with TOTAL colour control.
What else? Oh, colours: Blue: woad, home grown, fermented in the wee hot box. (see other blogs).
Many browns/oranges/rusts, these from eucalyptus, madder over some brown shetland, purple onion skins.
golden tans: plain onion skins. Greens from birch leaves + alum over dyed with woad. A bluey gray from woad. Mustard yellow... er, can't remember...rhubarb root? Sure lots of other things sneaked in, too.
Some of the brown sections are so complex and delicious, that these photos just don't do it justice.....

I am officially jealous of my husband for owning these socks. He did say " They're too nice to wear" for the first few days after his birthday. But he has succumbed to the full tactile/visual experience now, and they are regularly seen on his feet.

Woad, wonderful woad... growing and dyeing

So, the harvest has yielded!
This was my first year growing woad, and look at the lovely colour I got for my urine/ woad hot box combo ( see older posts for using this method ).
As blue is such a difficult natural dye colour to get, I decided to grow some this year from seed. I also know exactly where they came from (really local!) and there were no petrol transport miles involved in this process at all! I was donated the seed via a friend's mother, but also bought some on line.
One of the wonderful things about woad, is that you can harvest it in the first year of growth, in fact you need to, to get lovely blues, so the results are as quick as they can be!
I started growing these woad plants in February, as they really seem to need some frosty cold to germinate properly. Some seeds were sown directly into the ground, some were started off in little pots in my back yard. By the time it came to harvesting them ( any time from late August ), there was no difference in the size of either group of these plants, so either method is fine, but ofcourse, planting them in the ground first means , perhaps, one less process togo through ( although maybe more weeding?). Almost all the seeds germinated (hooray!), and a few leaves were a little munched here and there. In the end I had about 35 plants to harvest. One of them flowered, although woad is generally bienial in the UK (perhaps because some ants had decided to nest under it...). This plant is yet to bear fruit, so maybe might not this season, but an older plant I was donated has done, and I've harvested the black pendulous seeds from it, so hopefully can get a crop next year too.
It is the lovely lush green leaves you harvest, at a point in the year when they've had plenty of sun! Although this summer seemed very rainy, it was also rather sunny, and the proof is in this lovely blue I've obtained.
These leaves were harvested at the beginning of September, and brewed for two weeks in the warm urine vat. My harvest from the plants at this point was 1700 grams of leaves, and I used half of them for this brew, and reserved half of the dye liquid in (hopefully) airtight containers, for later use. This amount yielded about 300 grams of dyed fibres (mostly wool), from pale sky blues  (one dip, or when the vat was running out) to a rather dark blue (from as many as 4 dips).
The green in the picture was a lovely yellow from birch leaves on a young jacobs wool fibres, that I overdyed with one dip in the woad vat.
Wenslydale locks came out a more royal blue than the blue faced leicester and shetland wool fibres. The really deep jeans blue was on soya silk fibres, but bamboo fibres came out much paler ( top left hand corner, on second photo). I also dyed some naturally grey  and moorit shetland wool fibres: the blue only started to show after 3/4 dips, but I do like the effect too ( very top L hand corner, photo 2).
A month later, and I might be able to sneak one more harvest out of these plants before the cold darkness means they won't yield any more blue. If all turns out well, that might mean about 900 grams of fibres dyed from 35 plants.. We'll see how the saved dye liquid works out...

Finally, some photos of the lovely plants prior to harvest, they are about 6 inches in diameter...
 And woad in flower, not to be harvested for blues apparently!

Tree of Life Eco mitts

A dream realised, and I am mostly content with the result!
The reality is that REALITY and IDEAS ABOUT REALITY are not the same thing. This is especially true in the world of arts and crafts where you can have a brilliant creative idea, and what comes out of your dyepot or off your wheel and needles is just, well, disappointing. So mostly I am of the don't plan TOO much and see what happens persuasion. This is what doing abstract art at Art School does to your creativity...
However THIS project was pretty methodical! That's a knitting thing I think, knitting can be a very left brainy thing... The "see what happens" part of it was the dyeing and allowing a little magic into the yarn by not worrying too much where the 2 plies fell next to each other.
So. I found a pattern I really liked, although the mitts were a little too pointy for my tastes. (I understand it's a traditional shape, but it wasn't exactly me.) So "Tree of  Life". What could be more perfect for my "as low as I can go" low impact mittens?
Back in the summer I was gifted two fleeces from a friend who lives just up the road.(Yay! Very little carbon footprint there!) One a black hebredean, and one an unknown shearling. Upon sampling, they were both full of double cuts, but soft and springy. The shearling a little softer, the hebredean a little longer in staple. I set about gradually dyeing up the shearling fleece, mostly solar (& eco) dyeing over the summer, although the woad urine vat (see other blog post...) was heated on the stove every night and then wrapped up in a wool hotbox to maintain the required vat temps for the dyeing magic to occur.

Come the Autumn I got a drum carder! I was thinking of mittens. I was thinking of how the sky is in Yorkshire in the winter : layers of subtle greys, blues, pale yellows, odd hints of other colours. So I rummaged through my summer dyed stash and found a range of yellow to rust to grey to green, to beautiful woad dyed blues, all from Karen's shearling...., soft and springy. So I made them up into about 100g of batts: I carefully faded the batts from yellow on one side through browns and greys then to blues (with flecks of other colours here and there). I made two batts. I spun two bobbins short draw, (madly pulling out double cuts as I went) aiming to keep the colour sequence similar in both, and then plied them together to get " Wintery sky" the yarn above. The colours came out great, some parts more solid, some more heathery, which worked great for the winter sky effect I was going for. This was to be the background to the tree silouette, which I spun longdraw from rolags in the hebredean. (When I'd sampled it, longdraw worked out nice and soft, short draw, a bit too ropey...). The WPI was very very slightly thicker on the hebredean, which didn't matter too much...
On and off between Advent Fair and first snowfall, I squeezed in knitting up the mittens ( I was also knitting 3 Christmas presents at the same time...). Why is it harder to justify knitting for yourself?! I have no Catholic ancestory (or presentory...)...
I have done very little of this kind of knitting (stranding? colourwork?) before, only really some sampling of trad fair isle patterns on a scarf. So I was pleased it went so well, although some of the tree branches are a little improvised! The leaves were very pleasing to do, especially on the thumbs. One of the mitts has slight furrowing where I LINED UP MY FLOATS instead of staggering them, as I learned was best to do AFTERWARDS. But hey! live and learn. I'm not a perfectionist, and I'm pretty proud of the whole project, not least because they are very low impact on the sourcing and dyeing fronts, and quite beautiful in the snow/ bright sunlight!

Hot Box Natural Woad Dyeing

So, woad, what a fantastic quirky gift from Mother Nature...A leaf that yeilds a beautiful blue, but only if you hit upon the right alchemy...

This is my most recent method, involving that most maligned (because of the stink) of all waste products, WEE.
So first of all, fill a vessel with wee, let it sit, somewhere where it won't be disturbed or fiddled with for a least two weeks, until it stinks. You want the smell to make you gag when it gets you in the back of the throat. Then (if you're using powdered woad) add 2 teaspoons to approx 5 litres of gone off urine. With leaves, you just want to fill up your heatable vat (I use a big stainless steel pan) with as many leaves as you can and then pour the urine over them.
Then the method is the same: heat your vat with woad in to just slightly steaming point then PUT IT INTO YOUR PREPARED HOT BOX! This is the marvelous part of it for me, as I had to think it up myself!

I couldn't work out how I could keep my woad vat at a steady temperature, perhaps for several weeks, as I had no greenhouse, and our stove is never on constantly, as our house is too cosy, and doesn't need constant heating, even in the depths of winter. Then I remembered the hot box principle: Basically, heat whatever you need to keep at a constant temperature up to the temp you want it to be at, take it off the heat source, and then insulate it so that the heat stays in it. In my case, the most easily available insulation source was fleece (My house is literally full of the stuff). So I put a layer of it ( 2-3 inches)on the bottoms and sides of an old cardboard box, then placed the heated pots (in my case) with the woad urine vats in the hot box (see photo above) added a cosy wool covering to the pots, and shut the box up. I discovered that this will stay warm for approx 24 hrs, and then you just heat it up again to slightly steaming point, and put it back in the hot box again. Probably after 3-4 days the woad will have dispersed enough and the vats' oxygen reduced enough for you to begin dyeing. You should be able to tell because the vat will look greenish. If there is a blue scum floating on the surface you may need to add more gone off urine. I keep my wool fibre in for 24 hours to absorb the vat fully, and then I air it by pulling it carefully out of the vat on a stick and watching it magically turn blue in the Air! If it's too pale, I repeat the process and usually after 3 or 4 days it's a lovely mid blue. See above photo.
The important thing is too keep your vat at a steady temperature, although too cold is more easy to rescue than too hot, which can give you greys and maroons rather than the magical blue you are after.
I rinse my woad dyed wool in luke warm vinegar water to help it bond to the fibre. Then air it until I wash the smell fully out! The smell will always lingre a little, but generally only when the fibre is wet....
 You can top up your vat every few days with urine until the woad is worn out. If you have more woad, you can keep it going for weeks, but your family may not be impressed with the smell of you heating up the vat everyday on the stove.....