In the Making...

At the weekend, I went to a workshop at A Good Yarn, Cleethorpes . It was a "Dye your own yarn" workshop with Jonathan from Chroma Yarns . It was great fun and everyone made gorgeous coloured yarn. The dyes The aftermath Everyone's gorgeous yarns My finished yarn Yarn wound into a cake Hopefully, it'll find itself made into a pair of gloves (for a friend) at some point. Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I've spent a few days recently on my spinning wheel. Here are my latest yarn-like creations: Remember this? It was some of the Wensleydale/Silk roving I dyed recently - blogged here It's changed into a 2 ply, 15 w.p.i., 157m/100g - sport weight. I finished the Faux Cashmere I mentioned last week. It's 18 w.p.i., 268m/100g. I've finished the mate to the Teal Shetland - so it's all ready for some fair isle mittens. It's a very pale green, BFL, 161m, 17 w.p.i. Not identical to it's mate but close enough for the mittens. I've also made a couple of mini skeins. The sparkle will hopefully become a Christmas tree decoration;  and the other two are the start of a larger lot of yarns for another fair isle project. The original idea was for some Bandelier socks, so the colours I have are similar but think I might use the same pattern and improvise something else. Don't think I really want make a pair of s...

I had a wonderful day at the weekend. I spent the entire day in the back garden with my dyeing gear and my burco . The weather was gorgeous and it was really good to be out in the garden which I haven't done much this year. It's my first go at handpainting yarns and I made a complete and thorough mess even though I had my gloves and apron I seemed to have more dye on me than the yarn did! I dyed 3 lots of merino sock yarn (or at least I think it is as it wasn't labelled and from a bargain bin on the bluefaced.com stall) The yarn turned out like I wanted but I had a few problems with the fleece. I did something wrong somewhere because the pale greeny one was meant to be bright blue so it either needed an extra wash before hand or I didn't put enough citric acid in. The purple is wensleydale and silk and turned out as intended though.

At Woolfest, I bought a dyeing kit from D & T Crafts and I've been amassing all the equipment I'll need (such as gloves, dye pots etc.) when a lucky find turned up. I'd been planning to do most of it on the stove but a Burco Water Boiler appeared! It's from my parents-in-law, they used to keep turkeys commercially and used the boiler for cleaning up; they've moved on to arable farming so it was looking a little lost and forlorn in one of the barns.  It's been re-appropriated for dyeing. It's quite big so think I could do a fair amount at once. Not sure which technique to try with it but looking forward to some dyeing. I'd bought some lovely undyed rovings from Wingham's when I was there at the beginning of the week - (a very happy coincidence!).