I dyed up a batch of Opus-yarn (and some spinning fiber too) in one of my favorite colourways last week: “Summer Garden”:
I dyed 12 hanks of Opus (it’s a 100% BFL-wool yarn, about fingering/light worsted weight, soft and lustrous) using a special procedure so that all hanks are different, but of course will go perfectly together in a project! 🙂
The yarn is now available in my webshop. More photos there as well!
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!
A few days ago I sent off the club fibers for May, so I think it will be okay to show off the colorway now! 🙂
Here it is on a BFL/silk blend. I call the colorway “Icarus”, after the small butterfly that inspired me to pick these various blue, lavender and golden shades. Polyommatus icarus. A beautiful butterfly that fortunately still is quite common where I live.
I also dyed it on falklandwool:
I must say, I love it on both fibers, and hope the club-members like it just as much!
These days I’m in the process of creating next months club-colorway. I will not reveal anything about it yet, just that the June colorway will be very different from the “Icarus” of May..
To find out more about my fiber-club, please visit my Etsy-shop.
It runs as a 3-months subscription, and there’s still room for more clubbies.. 🙂
Bye for now, I have some knitting to attend to.
Hurray, it works! The fiber preparation that I’ve been working on and testing seems to perform the way I intended it to: easy drafting, easy spinning and a fun and interesting yarn!
This is a 3-ply yarn spun from the roving I showed in my previous post. Even though ther was some thin spots in my test-roving it was a pleasure to work with. I spun the singles on a spindle with the roving standing besides me in it’s paper-cover. Worked just perfect! It didn’t break (only in a few places where the roving was very very thin..) and it didn’t collapse when I got to the outer layers of fiber.
After spindle-spinning it I n-plied the yarn on my Kromski Symphonie wheel. the resulting yarn is soft and tweedy. With its 4 colors it would be good to use for a cowl, a hat or something like that. 80 grams and 174 meters. To knit this I would pick up a needle size 4 or 4½ mm, as a starting point.
So, now I have made some more Magic rolls of roving. Of course 🙂
This one is allready sold.. It has 8 soft spring-like colors and weighs about 80 grams.
The next two are currently for sale in my Etsy-shop:
They both have 8 colours. The first one weighs approx. 80 grams, the next one 86 grams. The fiber content in both of them are mostly merino, but also a little shetland wool, alpaca, BFL and some locks from an unknown Scandinavian sheep-breed.
I’m trying to figure out how to make a spinning roving that has built-in color progression and is super-easy to spin from.
Now I think I almost got it..
This roving pulls from the center of the roll and should (at least in theory) allow the spinner to spin a continuos thread with long color sequenses. There’s about 80 grams of fiber here and 4 different colors – also different types of fiber! Mostly merino, but also Bluefaced Leicester and a little bit of wensleydale (locks) and flax.
It’s going to be sooo interesting to spin this! Will it be easy to pull out the roving – or will it break all the time? And what happens when I get to the outer layer? Will the whole thing collapse and turn into a sorry tangled mess? I guess I just have to give it a go.. 🙂
A couple of days ago I was picking my brains for a good colorway-name for a new brown/golden color. This one (on BFL-fiber):
It reminded me of some animal. But which one? A squirrel, a fox, a camel, a bison ox? I couldn’t get my head around it, until suddely I looked over at the couch where our cat Rosa was taking her afternoon nap. Then I knew: it was the dark brown, reddish brown and golden colors of our sweet kitty!
For the second new colorway that I’m going to present in this post, I seeked naming help in a dictionary over the local herbs and flora. I named the blue-violet color “Cow Vetch” and it looks like this, dyed on silk hankies:
You can see this and all the other fibers I painted in these 2 new colorways, over at my Etsy-Shop!
What do you think? I’d be happy to read your opinions about my colors.. 🙂
Fresh and very bright green leaves are unfolding everywhere right now. It’s a delight to watch how the treetops getting greener and greener every day. Don’t you just love springtime?
My latest monochromatic colorway showcases the color of the newly sprung leaves of the beech in our Scandinavian woods. A truly inviting color, delicate, fresh, good enough to eat. In fact, you can eat the beech leaves while they are young. They taste really good!
Here’s the Beech Leaves colorway for you, shown on Bluefaced Leicester wool:
I have dyed this colorway on BFL, Shetland wool, Cheviot wool, a merino/bamboo luxuryblend and a set of silk Hankies. You can see it all in my Etsy-shop! (Yes, that’s new too!)
More new colorways are coming very soon. A dark brown is drying out back right now, and I’m thinking hard of a good name for it. I kind of reminds me of some kind of animal fur, but which animal is it now?? I have to think, look through some wild life-books, maybe..
Earlier today I painted some wool in a greyish purple hue. It’s still in the oven, can’t wait to see how this one turns out!
That’s fun! I love sampling. I really enjoy knitting swatches, too. Sampling and swatching are activities so full of anticipation, curiosity, and the results are full of promises of beautiful things to come. Or maybe they are not.. Anyway, is’t an exiting process!
Today I spun a sample of one of my new monochromatic colorways, “Savoy”. A rich, strong, warm green hue. The fiber has both light and dark places, at times almost black.
I spun the fiber (Blue Faced Leicester, not shetland which is actually the fiber shown in the photo above.) using one of my supported spindles, a russian style spindle from Aaes. Then plied the two strands together using another beautiful Aaes-spindle:
– Now it needs a hot bath (the yarn, not the spindle..) and afterwards I think it will become wristwarmers.
By the way, another new colorway is on its way: a deep dark blue.