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Thursday 28 April 2011

Autum in spring

These colours are quite autum-like, but I like the way they blended together

100% merino superwash, 100g, 390m, 2 ply.

Thursday 21 April 2011

Shades

I have some more samples of natural dyes:
Red clover(In Menorca we call it enclova, it was brought here by the british and we took the word from them)

with alum and cream of tartar

with iron

Asphodelus tops. Last year I got a very nice yellow from the leaves

Fennel

with alum and cream of tartar

with iron (I love this green!!)

Eucaliptus barck with iron. I never get the same colour with this stuff...

Together to better see the different colours

If I mix it with my last batch

I get 3 sets of shades from 3 different colours, about 100g each. The question now is how to spin it? Do I mix all the colours in 3 similar skeins? Or do I make 3 slightly variegated skeins with a different colour each? Yarns with subtil variations in colour are very useful, they cheer up plain stockinet and yet don't overshadow more elaborated stitches. Heavily variegated yarns are beautiful too, and I would have enough for a bigger project.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Dyes

Still catchig up with old pleasures

Left to right: weld, madder root, blackberry with alum and cream of tartar and blackberry with iron. On thing about natural dyes is that even using the same dyestuff and the same procedure you will never be able to get exactly the same colour twice. But still, I am intrigued by the very different colours that I get from blackberry stems, the first year I got gray, the second nothing and now dark green, I like the colour, but why does this happen? This time I had done exactly the same, same season, same type of stems, and I really was expecting to get gray. Is it the different locations of the plants, the different amount of rain water every year?