Needle felting

During the summer I dyed quite a few pieces of fleece and they have been sitting in a heap in the sewing room, gathering dust.  A few weeks ago I saw someone wearing a long necklace laced with buttons and the idea came to me to attempt to make a fleecy button necklace.  This fleece has been died with woad and some with indigo to give these blue shades.  It is very light in weight and I have other coloured pieces of fleece which will eventually be made into necklaces.

 Woad plantImage via Wikipedia

Wrist warmers

The weather is wet and mild - poor Ryder cup followers have been suffering in the bad weather.  This also means that I can't yet wear my wintery knits.  Such a shame!  These wrist warmers have been sitting in my glove bag waiting for an airing.  They are made from indigo dyed, Shetland DK yarn and are extra long to keep my arms cosy.  Come on Autumn, let's have some mellow cool and misty mornings.

Even more yarn.

Bought some more yarn at St David's, last week-end.  Natural grey, indigo and some brown rare breeds yarn.  Not sure what I am going to make with it but I do know that I don't have spare time to indulge in knitting for fun.

More fleece.

At the dye day the other week I used dryed heather flowers on this small piece of fleece and it came out a disappointing dirty yellow shade.  There was a vat of indigo so I popped the fleece in and it came out this lovely shade of green.  The photograph here doesn't show its lovely colour so well, but it is a pleasing shade.

Fun Dye Day

A group of us met with our pots, pans, gas stoves and dye materials to turn our fleece into a selection of beautiful colours.

This yarn colour was achieved by using logwood natural dye on a piece of yarn which had used alum as a mordant.  A delicate lilac.

The darker purple yarn here was from the same dye pot as the delicate lilac, but had been in the pot for about 2 hours longer.

We also used madder, lichen which had been steeping for 8 months (very smelly), brazilwood, heather, indigo and walnuts.  This time the madder produced apricot, which was not the result we had wanted but was pretty enough.