I spent some time this weekend fixing up the new design on my blog (do you like it?) and tidying up some of the pages.

I’ve added some additional items on the UK/US translation page (crochet hooks and terms) as several people had requested these and I updated my 2007 Finished Objects page. Whilst I was doing this last I realised that I had neglected to blog about the final result of two of my projects and so here they are.

The completed and blocked Melon Pattern Shawl and Clapotis.

The Melon Pattern shawl was knit as a wedding gift and the giftee was really pleased with it so that’s good! Here it is in the garden before it was gifted -

and here are some close-ups

I really love how this turned out and I still have three skeins of this yarn left so I’m planning to knit a shawl for myself.

The Clapotis was knit with the yarn I dyed with Kool-Aid  here is the yarn skeined

wound into a ball

knit up into Clapotis

and blocked

with a close-up

I love the way this turned out and I’m so excited that I took a skein of undyed yarn and turned it into this!!!

technorati tags:koolaid, lace, knit, clapotis, shawl, stole, scarf

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First the outgoing parcels -

I signed up for another Magic Yarn Ball swap on swap-bot and have been putting together some goodies for my partner, here they all are ready for wrapping

She is not a knitter and told me she would not be using whatever yarn I wound so just use “something cheap”. Now, as I don’t have anything “cheap” and as I didn’t like the idea of sending something that wouldn’t be used I decided to use ribbon. She is a crafter/scrapbooker and so I think she will use the ribbons, I tied them all together and then wound all the little goodies up like this

and finally wrapped the whole ball up in this gorgeous tea-towel

hope to post this off later this week…….it has a long way to travel and so even though the send date is not till the 15th July I wanted to get it done early.

Next parcel is the final reveal parcel for SP10, now my swap partner doesn’t know who I am yet but will do by the time she received the parcel so even if she sees this before it arrives she won’t know it’s for her and as soon as she does know it’s for her when she gets it then she’ll know who I am anyway……does that make any sense? Anway, basically, it doesn’t matter that I’m posting the details does it?

Here are the goodies

…she isn’t in England so I thought I’d send some English goodies - tea, sweeties, chocolates all from my country.

SP10 has been great fun - I’ve really enjoyed putting together parcels from my giftee and my gifter has been fabulous….which brings me to

Incoming Parcels

My SP10 gifter sent me a gift certificate for Angel Yarns for the last parcel and it’s taken me this long to decide what to spend it on but today my parcel arrived and it contained this -

“this” being Jaeger Extra Fine Merino Aran in Blue Haze, 13 balls of it actually. Angel Yarns had this on sale and I also had a credit from a previous order which, together with my VIP discount meant I had to pay very little to get them!

They are destined to become either Rogue,

Eris

both of these patterns are from www.girlfromauntie.com and I bought them ages ago

or A Cardigan for Arwen from Interweave Knits Winter 2006

I haven’t decided definitely which one it will be as yet….but thanks to my SP10 pal for giving me the means to buy the yarn for whichever one jumps from the needles….

My second incoming today was this

isn’t it beautiful? The gorgeous laceweight yarn I snagged from Posh Yarn this week - from the left 2 skeins of Eva 2ply laceweight 55% silk/45% cashmere in Houri, 3 skeins of Sophia 2ply laceweight pure cashmere in Cumulus and 2 skeins of Eva in Kelpie. The Kelpie was on sale as it is apparantly faulty, having some red on it but it is really hard to see and once knitted into something lacey will disappear completely.

I can’t wait to knit some wonderful, soft, lacey shawls and stoles with these….after my cobweb mohair shawl was such a success (the recipient thought it was wonderful which was the main thing!) I really want to try some more lace but with smooth yarns.

Finally - some actual knitting has been going on. You may remember by Kool Aid dyed yarn which I showed you some time ago? Well, I’ve now wound it into a ball -

and I finally decided what to do with it…thanks to all the suggestions, many of which were for scarves and shawls which is what I’ve gone with, here is -

Clapotis! I think the stocking stitch shows the colours off and I love the drop stitch. I’m making it narrower than set in the pattern (about half the width) and this should give me enough yarn to get a good length. I’m also thinking of adding buttons along one side to allow it to be turned into a shrug. More pictures as I progress.

The stitch markers were a pressie from my SP10 pal in my first parcel so that’s a nice full circle there…..

technorati tags:koolaid, sp10, swap, swapbot, knitty, knitting, poshyarn

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I had a wonderful day in Suffolk yesterday on a dye workshop at The Natural Dye Studio. This is the showroom at The Natural Dye Studio showing all her wonderful yarns -

This was the first workshop Amanda had run and there were 5 of us eager to learn everything she had to tell us! The first thing we did was collect our materials for some “hedgerow dyeing” - here we are cutting Cow Parsley and Nettles

after collecting the plants we had to cook them up to release the colour - both plants should give a yellow dye

This is Amanda filling one of her dye baths (which some of you may notice are 35 litre tea urns) with water

Amanda only uses only natural dyes and mordants, nothing that will be harmful to either the environment or herself - the mordants she uses are Alum, Cream of Tartar, Tannin and Washing Soda and for dyeing she uses only natural plants such as Alkanet (a native British plant), Madder (the root of a plant used since ancient times) and Weld (another British plant which grows alongside motorways)

For the dyeing workshop we used -

• Brazilwood- red
• Indigo - blue
• Nettles - yellow
• Cow Parsley - yellow

Once the nettles and the cow parsley had cooked up for a while we strained out the vegetable matter

and then returned the, now coloured, water to the heat adding the yarn we were to dye to simmer in the pans. The nettles produced a wonderful yellow dye and we continued to get colour from them all afternoon. The cow parsley was a little disappointing only giving a very pale yellow - this is one of the issues with using natural dyes from hedgerows etc, so many things can affect the colour, weather, age of the plant when you pick it, soil…..but it makes it quite exciting to experiment.

The yarn in the middle here was dyed with the cow parsley, the red was dyed in Madder.

We all had great fun and started experimenting with dip-dyeing -  here are all our skeins of yarn hanging over the indigo dye bath to dye just one end….

some of us tried tie-dying, over-dying one colour with another- I think we all quickly got caught up in Amanda’s obvious enthusiasm for dying and began looking excitedly to see what colour was coming out of the dye bath next! From just three dyes - we produced a huge range of colours, shades and patternings

One of the most interesting things is how different yarns take up the colour differently so mohair and blue faced leicester placed in the same dye bath for the same length of time come out different shades.

The indigo is fascinating, it’s an eastern plant and one of the oldest recorded dye plants. It is mentioned as a colour chosen for the Tabernacle of the Arc of the Covenant and some of the oldest scraps of fabric are dyed with it and it was the original dye for denim. Woad, which was used by the ancient Britons, produces the same chemical dye compound.

Indigo is water insoluble and so to dye with it you must make it undergo a chemical change - when a dyed fabric is removed from the dyebath the indigo oxidises and reverts to it’s insoluble form, which is why the blue dye in jeans rubs off onto your skin or your furniture. The earliest method used to dye with indigo was to mix it with stale urine - luckily we now have other additives which remove the oxygen so we didn’t have to go the stale urine route!!! Once the indigo has become soluble by removal of the oxygen from the water, the dye bath turns green. The yarn to be dyed has to be introduced carefully to avoid making bubbles and then removed carefully. As it emerges from the dye bath it is green and then it magically turns blue as it oxidises.

I had a really lovely day and would highly recommend a visit to Suffolk to see Amanda, she is so passionate about dyeing that you can’t help but come away enthused and inspired. Here are the yarns I dyed during the day -

From left to right - merino chunky dyed with Brazilwood, BFL dyed with Indigo and Brazilwood, BFL dyed with Nettles, Mohair Loop dyed with Indigo and then overdyed with Brazilwood, BFL dyed with cow parsley.

I’m off to collect plants now to try some more dyeing…..

technorati tags:workshop, dye, Natural, studio, dyeing

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OK, so you have just under 3 days to enter my blog contest and win a surprise yarn prize. The prize will come from my stash and it will be some quality yarn I promise (and maybe a few extra little surprises).

All you have to do is suggest a pattern for me to knit with my Kool Aid handpainted sport weight merino yarn -

Leave your suggestion as a comment on the original post which is here

I will close the competition at midnight (Bristish Summer Time) and draw a winner on the 1st June.

There is almost two weeks left to buy a ticket in the prize draw - click on the banner at the top of my blog or click here.

technorati tags:prize, contest, competition, dyed, dyeing, koolaid, yarn

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well, the title should produce some interesting key word searches landing here!!!! As promised, photos of the fully decorated bra for the Moonwalk

It started out as a plain white Playtex Wonderbra, I dyed it with “Swirlin’s Strawberry Starfruit” flavour Kool Aid to send it this lovely pink colour. I like the fact that the stitching didn’t dye so it looks like it’s pink with white embroidery round the sides and back!.

The large stars were iron-on rhinestone motifs, the smaller stars were little iron-on shapes and the really tiny sequins came as a long string which I was just going to iron on to the straps. However, I forgot they are elastic and when I tried it on the strings of sequins on the straps all separated. I then realised they were really easy to pull apart and fis on individually all over the bra. The final touch was the two pink organza beaded corsages which I bought and sewed on.

I do still have a beaded fringe to sew around the bottom edge but this is pretty much it.

oh - and the “strawberry flavour”? As I dyed it with strawberry Kool Aid it smells of strawberries!!!!!

There’s still time to sponsor me before next Saturday/Sunday here or if you want to take part in my prize draw to win some yummy yarn then you have until 9th June and you can enter at www.wendyswoolies.com/raffle.

The final result of my Kool Aid yarn dyeing experiment turned out very well (in my humble opinion!) here it is with the clogs that inspired the colours.

I love the combination of colours, I’m struggling to get a photo that shows how vibrant they are as the weather here is wet and grey - if we ever get any sun again I’ll take some photos outside.

The yarn is sportweight Merino wool and I’m now looking for ideas of what to knit with it….any suggestions just send them in. There’s 100gms and I estimate about 310 yards possibly a little more. The colours are really summery and, take my word, they shine in the sun!!!

So - a contest. Just leave a comment suggesting what I can knit with this fruit-flavoured yarn and I’ll pick one suggestion on 31st May and send the winner a yarny surprise from my stash!

I am open to suggestions for anything - doesn’t have to be socks!

technorati tags:moonwalk, koolaid, dyeing, bra, moonwalk, contest, competition

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