Mostly I’m dyeing fiber, not yarn. But lately that has changed, mainly because of my dyeing of the wonderful Yorkshire and Buble yarns for BC Garn.
But I have decided to dye some yarns for my own webshop also. Of course noting like the colourways I do for BC Garn, but my own palettes, like this one:
And this one:
Today I’m doing a batch of sock yarn in the colourway “Bright Mountain”. It’ll go on the webshop as soon as it’s dry!
I made this tam in the traditional fair isle style.
The yarn is 2-ply shetland wool. I spun 8 colours from one of my fiber-wheels, the September club-colour “Moorland”.
Then I charted the patterns and knitted the tam using the 3 darkest colours as background and the 5 brightest as pattern colours. Then I wrote the pattern (for now in Danish language only, but I’ll do an english version too..) and it’s now ready to enter the shop!
Hey! If you happen to be near Brande tomorrow you can come by and say hello at Brande Strikkefestival. I’ll be there with my handpainted fiber, my handspun yarns, patterns and some left over yarns from when I closed the physical shop this spring.
I have recently cut down my two twill shawls from the loom. They are now fringe-twisted, washed and ironed – and ready to leave home.. 🙂
The first one is merino/silk yarn in both warp and weft. It is 170 cms long and 56 cms wide. Plus fringes, which are about 15 cms. Soft, shiny, with a nice heavy drape.
Number two has the same warp, obviously, but then I used handspun alpaca/silk in one of the club colourways, “July”, as weft yarn. It is variegated and adds lots of life to the shawl:
It is extremely soft and luxourious. Dimensions: 56 cm x 180 cms, plus the fringe.
Both shawls are now in my webshop, together with lots and lots of fiber!
My loom is now standing naked, so I’m making plans for new weavings. With handspun.
Business is going so well, I simply have too little time to blog. What a luxury problem! 🙂
I have recently accepted a rather large order from one of this countrys most loved knitting and weaving yarn supplier. This one: BC Garn.
BC Garn has asked me to handpaint a big quantity of knitting yarns for them to sell to yarn shops around the country. First I have been test-dyeing, then it was approved (yay!) and two days ago I recieved two enormous boxes of very white yarn to work on.. I’m so happy to get this opportunity, and very exited about it all. Can’t wait to see “my” yarn in the local yarns shops, and later also the garments made from it..
It’s just awesome! 🙂
Do you want to have a sneak peek at some of the colours? Here’s two batches I did last week:
My new dress (or tunic) in fair isle style stranded knitting is called “Mirabel”. It has been underways for a little more than a year, but last week I finally got it done.
I like how it turned out. What do you think?:
I have drawn the different patterns myself and it was a joy knitting the garment and watch how it came along. There was no plan for the colour placement – that part I just made up as I went.
Now I have hauled out another unfinished object from the depths of a knitting basket. Also a fair isle garment, a sweater. Very traditional. This one I knit with wool yarn that I have dyed with plants and mushrooms. It wont turn out nearly as beautiful as the dress, but it will be a warm and comfy sweater for next winter.
I’ll show it when it’s done. I’m good into the second sleeve.
A few days ago my friend Hanne and I went to Lystbækgård to look at some spelsau wool. We are both members of the same “spinning circle” and next time we meet (on tuesday) we are going to play around with primitive wool types. Primitive sheep races features wool that has both long guard hairs and soft down wool. We are going to separate the down fibers from the guradhairs and for that purpose we of course need some spelsau!
Berit Killerich (to the left in the photo) is a professional shepherd. She owns Lystbækgård and raises the spelsau sheep. She gives sheep dog shows, makes shearing into “show-and-tell”, has a weaving school, a farm-shop with a wonderful café with organic food and drink and of course lots of premium quality wool in the barn.
Hanne (to the right) tries to decide which fleece she’s going to bring home. In the end she got 3, one more lovely than the other!
I held myself back and only purchased one fleece. But what a soft and curly beauty it is! It is a light fawn or oatmeal colour (with variations), very soft to touch and with long guard hairs (curls) not so coarse as they sometimes are. Berit told me this wool came from “an elderly lady” whose wool has gotten softer over the years.
Here it is, freshy washed but not entirely dry yet:
Doesn’t it just look delightful?
When it’s totally dry I will use my flicker to separate the two fiber types. The down will be good for soft knitting yarn and the long, shiny guard hairs I’ll spin into weaving yarn, for tapestry weaving!
Some natural dying will also happen to (at least some of) this wool. What a project! 🙂
Now, let me show you my newest spindle:
A Golding, a lightweight one. For a Golding it is quite plain and simple, but I have been eyeing this lovely brown-green wood, called Lignum vitae, for some time and now I had the opportunity to get one!
It’s a perfect spinner. Completely balanced, looong time spinning. That’s Golding. Always perfect tools. And lovely to look at too!
Oh! I almost forgot. Here’s the July-colorway. On Blue Faced Leicester:
i kind of like it. How about you?
There’s a lot going on, but I haven’t been very good at blogging about it. Sorry about that. But I’m quite busy all the time, things take time and sometimes I just have to make priorities.
Today I sent out the club-fibers for July fiber-club. The colours are soft and sun-bleached and summer-like, so I just called the colorway “July”. Well, you know. It just came to me.. 😉
I don’t have any photoes of “July”-fibers yet, but actually you can see the colors in my waeving in the previous post. I have spun the July-colors (alpaca/silk) using my Bosworth spindle and the singles yarn is used as weft in my shawl. Still on the loom, but soon to be finished! (if I get the time..)
I have beeen doing a little bit of natural dyeing too. Inspired by an experiment from Jenny Deans book “Wild Colours” I dyed this bunch of very small skeins in one dye-pot, with Curled Dock (Rumex crispus). I had mordanted beforehand with different mordants and then I treated some of the skeins with different stuff after the dyeing. That way I got a lot (25) of different shades from just a single dyebath. I’m going to use these yarns in a fair isle project.
All the shades go so well together!
Last week I was at a tapestry class. Great fun! I learned a lot and really really want to get some work done on my big tapestry loom – but the time is not for that right now, sadly..
Also spinning a little bit. Not much, I mus admit. But in the latest issue of Spin-Off Magazine I read about a really cool technique: Ply-on-the-fly, using a spindle. i just had to try my hands at that method of spinning and navahoplying at the same time, and after a little fumbling and trial-and-error I finally got it. Here’s the Polwarth I spun and plied-on-the-fly:
I have made two of these balls. Still two to go..
The fiber is ready. Packed and ready for sending off tomorrow. It’s still a little too early to show the June-colorway on the fibers, but I’ll show you my inspiration for this months colors:
A wonderful painting by a friend of mine, Karen Margrethe Jelonek. She is a very talented artist, and I was so fortunate to get this beauty in a trade for a piece of furniture.. Lucky me!
The colors of this flower painting are deep and rich. Reds, dark and strong and warm, deep dark blues and greens and browns. I just loved the painting the moment I saw it, and also knew right away that these hues just had to become a fiber-colorway..
I’ll show the actual June-fibers in a few days!
I just want to say that there are a few available slots in the Fiber Club , starting from June. So if you are very quick you can still join the fun for this month and the next two. See my Etsy-shop for details!
Other than dyeing fbers (and yesterday some yarn as well) I am been weaving these days. I’ve warped the loom with a merino/silk warp in three colors and threaded the shafts for a twill structure. It’s going to end up with two shawls. The first one is allready woven and still sits on the loom. Now I’m weaving the second one:
Using handdyed, handspun weft for this one. Alpaca and silk singles that I’m spinning (as I go along) on one of my favorite spindles, a Bosworth midi. It’s yummy stuff!
I the small, quiet village Thorning you can find and visit Blicheregnen’s Museum. Together with my friend Mariann I went there today to see an embroidery exibition.
I don’t sew embroidery. Mariann does a little. I haven’t done any cross stitch since I was in my teens, and that lies many years back.. Never the less, the patterns and colors traditionally used by craftswomen of the Middel East (Syria, Palestine, Gaza) are fabulous, to say the least, and can easily provide inspiration to knitting patterns and weaving.
The exibition was partly dresses, coats, pillows and shawls from the Middle Eastern countries, but there was also embrodery (purses, mainly) from the Danish artist, Elisabeth Amdisen, who has created the exibition. She has also written a book about it – I bought that, and got it signed by the author, who just happend to be there today.. 🙂
Beautiful book, with lots of wonderful ideas!
The dresses with their richly patterned surfaces were fantastic. Here you see two of them:
All the patterns have their special meaning – it’s not just decoration. Many of the patterns were to protect from evil or accidents, a thing that we also know in Northern European (knitting)tradition.
Here is detail from af pillowcase:
The colors and geometric balance of this work is really captivating!
Now I’ll find the sofa and have a closer look at my new embroidery book.
Today my good friend Elisabeth had asked me to meet her at a local art center, Silkeborg Bad Kunstcenter.
Elisabeth wanted to show me an exibition of wonderful woven tapestries by a group of European art tapestry weavers. The artists call themselves European Tapestry Forum (ETF) and the juried exibition is called ARTAPESTRY3.
And it was interesting stuff! As a wannebe-tapestry weaver I was mostly drawn to the technical aspects of the artworks, and not so much the artistic impression..
Elisabeth and I have both signed up for a two day workshop in tapestry weaving later this month, so todays expedition was kind of a study filed trip..
The colors, the size, the impact of all those very different weavings was overwhelming! I snapped some photos, of which very few were a decent quality.
I’ll just show a few, like this hanging, woven of fabric strips like our well-known, good old scrappy floormatts.
It was sooo hard not to touch the hangings, and so tempting to lift them out to inspect the backside.. We were of course thrilled when we came to a tapestry that stood out from the wall just enough for us to get a good look behind the surface:
As you can see, the back side of this very colorfull piece looks almost like rya. No weaving in ends here! Notice how Elisabeth holds tight to her hands.. We didn’t touch anything. And, because touching was not allowed (and this maybe is a bit nerdy) we simply used another one of our senses: we actually sniffed in the fabric with our noses in an attempt to find out if a certain part of a weaving was made out of silal of silk. Elisabeth even claimed that the colors had their own different smells, like in this piece woven with naturally dyed nettle yarns:
But mostly it was the use of many strands of yarn to create subtle color variations and a lively surface that was interesting to me. Like this:
Beautiful, isn’t it? I would love to be able to weave just remotely like this some day..
We also visited another exibition today in the same place. “Netmaskerne“, a group of Danish machine knitters opened their show fabolous, interesting and gorgeous dresses and robes, and of course we went to have a look.. 🙂
Beautiful stuff!!
Back home I immediately sat down to weave a bit on my pratice-tapestry:
I have to admit that I’m quite intimidated by all the colors I have to control to get the right look of the mushrooms. It’s not easy at all! But I guess I just need to remind myself that it is a practice piece, and that I’ll learn by doing (and hopefully learn a lot at the tapestry-class later this month..).