More on playing with sticks, and onion skins :-)

Happy Fibre Arts Friday! Last week I talked about playing with sticks and strings in my new fad backstrap and tablet weaving, this week I have been playing with sticks of a different kind :-)

I made these DIY turkish spindles during the Tour de Fleece when I had to be on the road for a few days, then I just neglected them after I got home. But recently my wheel has developed a clanking noise and I can see that the brackets holding the spokes are becoming loose, I sent an email to Ashford asking for advice but in the meantime I daren't use it in fear that it may get worse. So I'm back to these sticks, the one on the left was made of cardboard decorated by Elli my youngest son:

I've been spinning on these interchangeably, the theory is that they will finish around the same time so I don't have to wait to ply. As you can see the progress is not great, especially when you are used to the speed of the wheel. But I'm perservering, not that I have much choice at this moment... I think I'm about halfway. The spinning is quite fine so I'm hoping for a nice lace weight :-)

Now you all know I like to play with all kinds of stuff that can be used for dyeing, this week I'd like to share my latest experiment with onion skins. I've been wanting to do this for quite some time but kept getting distracted, I was prompted by the fullness of the little tin I used to collect onion skins - that was a couple of weeks ago.

At that time I happened to have some leftover white wine on hand... how can you have leftover wine you might ask? That's because I prefer red, but I use (cheap) white for cooking. Remembering reading somewhere that alcohol could enhance the colour in dyeing, or was it for mordant? anyway I chucked the leftover wine in the soaking pot and left it for a few days. The colour/pigment gradually came out and got stronger each day, I then drained the juice and marinated my yarn (alum mordanted) in it, and just left it... Oh OK I forgot about it... a week later I suddenly remembered about the yarn marinate and was surprised to find the water clear. So I gave the yarn a rinse, no colour came out, and ta da!

Who could have thought a handful of brown onion skins could give such vibrant colour? I didn't even need to use heat, just some time... it must be the white wine ;-)

That's me for the week, what have you been up to?

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Mordant Wonders

A few weeks ago we had some storms which resulted in many fallen branches... and yes, you guessed right, this branch followed me home ;-)

This is a different species to the one I used before, although I haven't confirmed what it is yet as the identification of eucalyptus is proving to be a real challenge - that's another issue entirely, one I would like to learn more about but don't have the time right now. But even I can tell the differences: the leaves are of a slightly darker shade with a bluish tint, also the bark of the tree was rough and dark rather than brown and stringy like the last time, etc. However when I fed this information to Google it turned up a dozen possibilities, I'm just not skilled enough to pick this out from thousands of varieties of eucalyptus. So for now all I need to know is that it came from a tree in the park near the train station.

Anyway my initial attempt at dyeing a white skein pre-mordanted with alum returned a dark beige, not very exciting. Then I remembered from reading Spinning Around that you can change the colour by using different mordant and there were recipes in the book for making different "mordant teas"...  these are not real teas of course but a way of acquiring mordant without the use of chemicals. So I made a "iron tea" by soaking some metal hairpins in white vinegar, then I added the "iron tea" to the dye bath and added the beige skein, not knowing what to expect. Imagine then my surprise when I lifted the skein after simmering, a cool olive green, how's that for a change!

I was encouraged by the result, and as the dye bath was not exhausted I looked for something else to dye. There were a couple of balls fingering wool yarn in my stash that I was not crazy about, so they became the next experiment. The photos below are before and after:

The before colourway reminds me of German flag for some reason, not that I have anything against Germany, I mean I love sauerkraut! I'm just not too keen on these colours in one ball/skein, the afterwards muted tones are much more appealing to me :)

I am going to suspend any project that is intricate for a while, as I just started working on a trial which is likely to run for the next three weeks or longer, the demand on those little grey cells in the courtroom is a bit taxing on the old brain that I find it hard to concentrate when I get home. So for the time being I'm favouring mindless activities, like spinning...

This was an experiment with a merino/sparkly blend, I think the sparkly might be angelina but can't be certain. It came out rather well, n'est-ce pas? :)

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The Name's Beans, Black Beans.

I've been reading about dyeing with black beans on Ravelry and after seeing other people's wonderful results I was itching to have a go. I bought some black beans from the Asian grocery store:

I then put some beans in a large container and covered with plenty of water to soak in a dark cupboard, the water turned a murky muddy reddish brown after a few days. Not sure what to expect I filled a glass jar with some murky bean water and dunked a skein of pre-mordanted (alum) white wool in there and left it to cook in the sun:

See how murky the water is? Not very inviting is it? So imagine my surprise when I took the skein out and saw the result:

A beautiful soft denim, bingo! ...  I love this kind of dyeing, not much fuss,  some basic preparation and then just let time and the sun do all the work, like magic ;-)

I also managed to finish the Cookies & Cream Baby Blanket I was making for a friend.

Now a few words about motif projects:
Pros: Portable - worked one at a time so you can take it anywhere and use any spare moment; Modular - you can easily adapt the pattern to suit your needs.
Cons: Ends, ends, millions of ends! If you don't like weaving in ends, like me, then you should think carefully before embarking on a project made with motifs. This blanket is made up with 66 motifs, that's 132 ends to weave in. At least I did "join as you go" so there was no sewing.
The verdict? You won't be seeing me starting another motif project anytime soon ;-)

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Back to the dye pot...

I apologise for those folks who came to visit last week and found the house empty, there was nothing wrong with me except being extremely disorganised. In fact I seem to have scattered my brain in the last couple weeks... I turned up at my spinning group Wednesday evening only to realise that it wasn't on (I'd seen the notice on Facebook but didn't really register), burnt the pot dry while cooking some yarn on the stove (dyeing in coffee), planned to catch some rainwater to soak eucalyptus barks but forgot to put the bucket out... It's just one of those silly phases I tell myself, it'll pass and I shall have my full faculty back sharp as a tack, surely!

So I did some dyeing and here are the results:

This is the skein cooked in leftover coffee (from the percolator not my cup!) and the pot burnt dry, luckily I caught it just in time that the yarn was not ruined. The colour is much lighter than I imagined - I'd seen other people's results that's a real rich coffee brown, maybe my coffee was not strong, a bit like latte ;-)

The next one was solar dyed in the eucalyptus dye stock from a few weeks ago, last time the colour was a very light lemony yellow. I'd let the dye stock brewing in the sun for a bit, and you can see the result is much darker. So definitely no red, the search for red dye producing eucalyptus continues.

Both yarns came from a white wool base, it was first soaked in a vinegar and washing liquid solution and mordanted with potassium alum plus COT or creme of tartar. I am pleased with the results yet can't help feeling a tad disappointed, I had hoped that by brewing the eucalyptus it would produce a richer still shade but it was not to be. But that's part of the fun of natural dyeing, it's all about experimenting and keeping records. I'll have a post on record keeping another time, it's an art in itself which I am still learning.

For DH's jumper I have spun up 11 skeins of yarn, but they are of a variety of shades and thickness, as you can see from the photo below. It's going to be interesting to see how it turns out ;-)

I'm not sure if I have enough but I do have another brown/black fleece, naturally it will be a different shade...

Thanks for dropping by, there is more fibre arts fun at Wisdom Begins in Wonder. Indulge your creative side and join the party!