Hot Off the Wheel MHE yarn

This is a 2 ply yarn I spun over the christmas period. I really love the colours, and it was thrilling watching them unfold into singles and then a further blending into a 2 ply. This extra fine merino wool was dyed by My Heart Exposed, using plant dyes, and is called " Nature's Perspective" from the Lady Mya collection. I prefer to work with non merino wools, but I loved this colourway... I found that I was glowing with happiness as the greener and redder shades came through, and was a little restless if  I hit a patch of blue! Probably that means something other than I obviously dislike blue! Some pointer to where I need to do more soul work?
 But what shall I knit with it? It turned out a little thicker than I was hoping for my lacey shawl project, so I will have to find some other use for it.

Wool in every room

I fell asleep last night with the comforting thought that there was wool in every room of the house! Here are the photos and I'll explain...
1 Top: Bath of wool
2 Middle: Shelf of wool
3 Bottom: Bobbin of wool
The most comforting of all, is that some of  a Texel fleece (this one from Woolfest), is currently cleaning in the bath overnight. I aim to do it over night, and through most of the next day, so as to cause the minimum of disruption to my family. It will soak overnight in hot water with some washing soda, and then in the morning a hot rinse, and then another later on. Then by bathtime i need to have moved the fleece up to the loft to start drying , as it's winter, flat on a sheet.
I love to be washing a fleece, as it means lots more to spin. The only hassle is when you're having to do it in a hurry. I also love the fact that I know exactly where this fleece is from, and that only gentle cleaning products have been used on it, and that no electricity has been used to produce something spinnable.
And somehow, the whole process gives me a secret smile of satisfaction...
Photos 2 and 3 are both from the living room, and show last night's spinning from my own hand blended hand plant dyed batts, and "the wool basket", which has all sorts in, currently a dry felted Mother Earth who needs fixing, my Christmas present from the family (a niddy noddy), my current spindle spinning of hand blended batts in a red/brown/purple colourway of merino, silk, waste nylon glitz, blue faced leicester and other random bits, plenty of handspun, some hand dyed, hand blended singles, and some a My Heart Exposed fibre artist dyed two ply, also various knitting needles, a bag of knitting (currently a bootie), and small left over balls of yarn, which i constantly use to tie things up.
Both photos 2 and 3  have yarns in process which are very slender for me, as I am hoping to get something usable for knitting a lacey shawlette.
So that's the bathroom and the living room. The kitchen has some red and green two ply, handspun by Fay my 8 year old daughter, drying after having been set. Mine and Marc's bedroom has a basket and two boxes of unpun wool, mostly tops. One of the boxes holds my Etsy shop contents, mostly plant dyed tops at the moment. I happy to say that I've needed to do a slight restock recently as people have been buying it for spinning and dry felting. Hooray!
The loft has fleeces needing washing or carding in it, and my precious stash of yarn. The girl's room has Fay's stash of yarn, and her tops for spinning, and what she's spun too! Which makes a houseful of wool.
(ofcourse there's always my knitting and Fay's crochet projects, which travel around the house too....)

Logwood dyeing

Strangely, all of the above fibres are dyed with logwood. As is often the case with plant dyes, if you process them differently, you get different effects. Logwood (usually bought as a powder or chippings from dye suppliers) I have found, produces colours ranging from red to magenta to purple to brown.
Red was obtained by solar dyeing the fibres (cotswold wool) in a large Kilner jar, using rain water. The chippings of logwood were put in the bottom of the jar on our East facing window sill in the hieght of sunny summer for a week, unmordanted wool and water were added.A bold red resulted!
This red wool when immersed for 30 mins in water with washing soda added turned magenta, excitingly!
A deep purple was obtained from (hard) tap water with Alum dissolved in it, soaking the logwood chips in it over night and then slowly heating it to simmer twice. The chips were strained off. The dye liquor was allowed to cool, then wool was added and heated up to simmer twice, slowly.  I left it in overnight, and a vibrant purple resulted.
The same logwood chips were allowed to soak overnight with tap water and Vinegar ( a whole bottle!), and in a similar process to before, I obtained a deep brown.
The logwood in the photos above has made the purple, brown and pinky red.
Aparentally it can also make blue. And I find it is a reasonably priced dyestuff too.

What I got from Secret Santa

I don't normally look this serious, MW was dallying over the photo and it took him a while. Thank you my Secret Santa for this many shades of green wool fibre. I currently have no specific plans for it, as I have a spinning and knitting backlog.

Finishing felt piece and Handspun 3 ply socks!

One advantage to this snow is being house bound, which ofcourse means lots of woolwork oportunities! So I've finally been able to finish off my felt commision. It worked out OK in the end, but I was worried when I'd finished wet felting the basic piece and it was just erm VERY ABSTRACT, which wasn't what I was aiming for. Luckily the power of a dry felting needle helped me to resolve some areas and give it a little more definition. Hooray for the versatility of wool!

My other triumphant finishing moment was this morning with these socks. Wonderful warm cosy woolly socks for Me! made from my very own hand plant dyed, handspun three ply wool yarns. The toes and heels are deliberately more hard wearing, ie slightly thicker and plied very tightly! I've had problems in the past with having to continually darn 100% wool socks, so I shall see, and possibly update you, as to how well these wear. The wools used are2 plys of texel and one of blue faced leicester. The heels and toes "Tweedy Yarn" is a very random selection of gathered from barbed wire wool, odd bits of merino, silk, kempy wools, slightly felted in dyeing experiments etc. The plant dyed colours are from onion skins(bronze), elderberries (green), exhausted damsons (pink), elder + tumeric (mossy green).
I hadn't really gone for it with 3 plying before, but I really enjoyed the mixing of the colours and the round springiness of the yarns. A 3 ply really did make my ribs "pop" in a way a 2 ply or singles wouldn't've (is that a word?).

Blue from Cabbage

As dyestuffs become less easy to obtain from weeds in winter, I roam in search of dye from the grocer's shelf. I have recently stumbled accross this ad hoc method for obtaining a blue or sometimes slate blue/grey from red (purple) cabbages:
First get, by whatever means you are comfortable, one to two red cabbages.
Next chop them up until you have enough to fill your Dyepot (Stainless steel is best, as some metals ie iron, aluminium and copper can change your dye colour..). Add enough water to cover cabbage ( rain water is best), then simmer for at least an hour. Strain the cabbage dregs out and put on the compost heap.
The water will be an outrageously gorgeous shade of purple, but that means nothing in the world of plant dyeing. At this point add some (half a bottle?) of vinegar to help the dye bite into the wool.
Let this dyepot sit and cool.
Thoroughly wet your wool to be dyed. But do not agitate it. Be gentle and caressing.
When your dye pot is no more than luke warm you can immerse your wool in it and then slowly (to prevent felting) bring it up to simmering. Simmer for at least 20 mins. Then you can take it off the heat. I like to leave my wool in the pot of dye a least overnight, to ensure a reasonable colour.
Then you can rinse out the dye, and you should have a sort of sky to slate blue. I found with Blue Faced Leicester white tops, I got blue, but The Texel white I dyed at the same time in the same pot came out greyer. Ah, the curious world of plant dyeing....
The photo at the top of this blog entry features BFL dyed with red cabbage, tumeric, exhausted logwood, and onion skins (kindly saved and donated by my local real health food shop Alligator, Thanks).

Damsons as dye

I unexpectedly had a lot of damsons on my hands.... what could I do when I realised that they'd gone mouldy waiting for me to make them into jam? Simmer them up in some rain water with some vinegar (chip shop sort), strain  the mush off, and dye some wool with them, ofcourse... The above Texel fibre is dyed with Damsons (the rusty bits), and elderberries, and ofcourse urine.
I love this one, and will spin it when it's time expires on Etsy if another fibre enthusiast doesn't get there first...

This fibre, Autumn Glow, also has damson in it, as well as elderberries and docks and madder... And although I'm not  a "yellow" person, I find the combo quite suave. None of this dyeing process was exceptionally smelly, although the damsons did start to get a bit musty before they'd been simmered up. All the waste is composting nicely though... I used Texel wool for both of these two fibres. I love it actually! I am really starting to feel that whilst Merino has a place as a fibre, the bounce and texture of many other wools, are often way more thrilling to me!