Yes! Look at all these beautiful yellows and purples just in time for knitting that perfect autumn hat! There's rather a lot of new colours in Chunky and Worsted weight (NEW!) up in the shop right now.There's only one or two skeins of each of these so grab 'em quick! There were shown during my final show, and are some of my favourites.
You might even spot a couple *NEW* test ranges. Like slub...
I'm travelling up to Birmmingham this week for a business trip with Hobzy! So all orders will ship out on Friday as usual, but I might not get to e-mails untill Thursday. Love, Kimxo
So excited to share with you this brand new product! It's something I've been dreaming up all summer. Naturally Hand-Dyed Spinning Fibre! There's three different 'ranges'; the Solids, the Tie-Dye and the Space. Check it out in the shop!Each braid of 100g is £10. If you see the prices vary, it's because a braid isn't quite 100g. Just being fair. :] I seriously can't decide which is my favourite, I love them all.
Click here to go shopping and read more about them in the item descriptions! I've tried to give you lots of information, cause I know how tempting they can be!
Beyond excited to finally be able to release this delishious new product! I'll tell you all about it tomorrow, including the story of what made me want to share ready-to-spin roving. It's been a while dear blog readers. It's good to see you all again. Kimxo
Hey! It's Wednesday! Sometimes I do what I like to call 'Wool On The Wheel' on Wednesdays. Pretty much I share with you a yarn that I've spun up recently. Sometimes it's actually 'on the wheel' when I photograph it, and sometimes I share the end result. This week I want to wet your appetite a little bit for a shop update that's in the works.
This yarn was my first real experiment that turned into a new Collection called 'Medieval'. It's a sock weight 2ply yarn and completely natural! Dyed BFL fleece with natural dyes (here, Logwood, the purple!) is mixed with natural brown and grey BFL to create a more 'earthy' and 'old world' colour and texture.Originally I was inspired by the elaborate garments shown in paintings of Royalty at the National Portrait Gallery- but I also wanted it to be a bit more down to earth, so I started watching programs set in that era (and also fantasy like King Arthur and Game Of Thrones) and found that there were a lot more knitted and handmade looking garments in the lower classes. I love the big stitching on jackets especially.
Anyway, I digress. This yarn brings back all those feels. It's an absolute pleasure to spin, although because it is so skinny, it takes me AGES to get through one batt of fleece and even longer to fill up one bobbin. I like to imagine a slower pace of life and the spinning for a need (i.e. a family member needs a pair of socks because they got eaten by a dragon or something... haha) rather than a want. I usually listen to Shakespeare radio plays or watch Merlin while I'm spinning this.
Pictured above is the skein tied with some White fleece. I washed and fixed it with this in place so I could see if the dye ran. It didn't!
There will be four colourways of this wool up for sale in the Shop soon. Are you excited? I'm excited!Above is a close up of the yarn, with a little cheeky bit of turquoise that weasled it's way in to this particular skein. Naughty!Lots of Love, Kimxo
Mmm. Delicious Madder Reds. Mmm. Bright Buckthorn Yellows. Let's put the second exhausts together and see what we get... ... some Pale Peachy Oranges:
I love it that Natural Dyeing is always surprising me with it's colour combos. Always blow away that these colours come from nature and plants. The earth really does provide enough. Some more yummy eye candy & experiements:
For those of you that have never done any dying before. The general procedure is to make a dyebath and put the wool in it. Then you wait for a while, take it out and it's dyed! It's kind of hard to go wrong, really.
With Indigo, it's a slightly different process. You make the dyebath through a bunch of science like mixtures, and 'oxidize' the water (which sounded really high-tech to me). You don't need to pre-treat the wool at all, except wet it. The tricky part comes when you actually get down to the dyeing part. You can't leave the wool in too long or it will 'contaminate' the rest of the dyebath. And, get this- although you're dying it blue the dyebath is yellow. YES YELLOW. When you lift the wool out of the dyebath it changes magically before your eyes. MAGIC.
I nearly squealed in delight at my potion brilliance. (Slughorn would be proud.) You can only use the dyebath once because as soon as it gets oxygen in it- it turns blue and you can't reuse it. You can, however, re-dunk wool to create darker shades.
This is a sample of my first Indigo experiments (done in Nov 2012).
(From right to left: Once in Indigo. Several times in Indigo. Grey fleece several times in Indigo.) Also, because I'm an overachiever (Not really, I just get excited) I tried overdying with some wool that had previously been naturally dyed Yellow.Yellow + Blue = Green!Because it was my first time, I only tried little bits and played around with times. The darker blue I 'dunked' several times. I even tried leaving some bits in the remainer of the dyebath once I was done (for like an hour) but it didn't look much darker.You like? Kimxo
Around christmas, a lovely neighbour friend of my Mum's (and mine!) commissioned some beautiful handspun from me. She saw something I'd made for Mum and wanted something similar. So we got together and chose colours. I'm pretty proud of this, cause it's mostly naturally dyed colours! But the really cool thing about it, is that it's spun in a gradient so when she knits it up, it will go from those dark blues through to the magical purples and into that bouncy pink. There's just enough for making 1 cowl, so it's really unique! You can see that I've plied it with a thin sewing cotton, to give it strength. :] It's also nice and thick'n'thin so it's fun to knit with!
During one of her visits, I also gave her a refresher course in spinning and here are her results:Pretty good, eh? :] Kimxo
When I'm dying fleece in my kitchen, it's usually an all-day event, and I don't get to the exciting colour-on-fleece part till 3/4 the way through. There's a lot of prep and post things to be done. Soaking the fleece, getting the mordant ready, cooling the mordant, transferring the fleece to the mordant...It's a labour of love, but that's why I like it so much. It's magical. And time is a crucial part of it. Time and chemistry. And searching dusty old volumes in the library- looking for the perfect way to fix dye.Finally found it this weekend! Victory! And you know what that means... no running dye. Which means... I can sell Naturally Hand Dyed Wool in the shop soon!!!!!! I've been holding out because I wanted to be confident that it was going to stay. And now it does! I'm so happy. :] Kimxo
Here is another batch of fleece that I dyed because I couldn't throw away the dyebath without exhausting it completely. Such beautiful pale colours.Due to my (most probably late night) neglect, you can see bits of white where I didn't prep the fleece properly and dye didn't get. Nevermind. Good thing I'm a fan of loving and embracing all mistakes!There's enough here to make a nice shawl I think. Or matching jumpers for twin babies maybe? Or some mittens and a hat for a cold spring day. We shall just have to wait and see what it wants to become. kxo
Whilst filming for my Channel project- Ame (a fellow Illustration student) came and helped out with some of the more 'close up' shots of the Natural Dyeing process. Ame did a beautiful job- and also snapped these amazing film photos during the day.I love the overexposed, dreamy quality to these photos & check out this drawing Ame did too! Magic.Of course- Negs was no help at all- the lazy little kitty cat. hehe. But she does like it when Ame comes round and brings treats! :]
