Autum in spring

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

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

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.

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?

Old pleasures

100g, superwash merino, 500m. I hadn't been spinning for a long time. I took my time, no rush, spinning just for the sake of spinning, the result is unimportant.

grr...it's so difficult to take an acurate picture of these colours

Knit-1

Possibly you are not wondering what have I been doing in the last 2 months, but I am going to tell you anyway: I was knitting! But a different kind of knitting, I spent 6 weeks in Brighton learning to knit on domestic knitting machines at the amazing design studio of Knit-1. At first I was a little overwhelmed, the classemates (they are from around the world)were designers or design students, and they took everything pretty seriously, the first day I was a little scared, but the teacher is great, she explains everything very well, and the course is very intensive (7 hours a day) so you learn very fast, you can see your improvement from one day to the next, so after a couple of days I felt really comfortable. I got to learn and develope several useful techniques, I met great people and had more fun than I have had in a long time. Wanna see some of the samples I managed to produce?
Examples of the different thechniques

Some full garments too

I have to weave in the ends of this one, plus it's too small form me, as you can see, but my mom has already called it for herself.

I love the last one.

Brighton

Saint peter's church

Colourful houses


Pavilion

Pier and beach


Don't ask me

Bath!

Lovely, lovely Bath

With it's beautiful bridge over it's beautiful river


Parks and gardens

Abbey

Inside

From the big pool of the roman baths(amazing)

Roman whorls

Stunning sunsets from the train station