I've combed the Olive Green Jacob fleece

Back in September I dyed 427g of Jacob fleece a kind of Olive Green using Greener Shades dye at 1%, made up of 45% River Blue, 45% Sunshine Yellow and 10% Ruby Red.  I have now combed that fleece and am left with 246g of fluff to do with what I want, most likely used in a blend.

As you can see from the photo showing a sample of the nests I got from it, it has created hand combed nests in a variety of shades but once its spun up or used in a blend and spun up it will all work well together to make something pretty and interesting.

Look what's arrived!

It's here, it's here, it's here.  Happy Christmas to me.  Just a couple of weeks and I can start opening the packets.

Design LF433 - Pretty in Red (or the Ladybird shawl)

I started making this back in January and then I must have put it to one side after completing the flowers for some reason before picking it up again last week and joining them all together with the main colour. 

I have used Twilley's Goldfingering in shades WG4/004 light gold, WG31/031 black and a couple of different dye lots of WG38/038 red.

I didn't make any notes nor did I seem to take any work-in-progress photos other than a couple where I am preparing to add the fringing.  My eldest daughter said that I had made the sofa look like a Christmas candy cane.  I did run out of space and so I used the back of a couple of cushions on the floor.  The reason I laid them out like this was because whilst I was able to use one dye lot for the shawl I had to use a couple of different dye lots of red when I got to the fringing part and so I cut the lengths and divided them across the number of tassels and then the other dye lots were cut and added in equal amounts to each tassel.  This means that all of the tassels are made from mixed dye lots but it won't be obvious because they all contain mixed dye lots.

I think the final shawl looks a bit like a ladybird.

Design A444 - In Green Cotton

I am still ploughing on with using up the aran weight cotton yarn, I'm getting there but not there yet.  I have some very bright yellow that I have used as flower centres but it's not really the colour that I hoped for when I ordered "lemon".  I was expecting a nice pale yellow and I got this "lemon rind yellow" colour.  That'll teach me for shopping and ordering when I am tired, I obviously wasn't paying full attention. 

So, now that I just have a whole load of bright yellow doing nothing I decided to over-dye it to make it more usuable and a more appealing colour cos it's going to take someone really special to pull that bright yellow off.  Pass the sunglasses.  I bought some dye for cotton, Dylon handwash dye in shade "Ocean Blue".  I wound the balls of cotton onto my niddy-noddy and tied each one off loosely so I had 7 and a half skeins.  You have to make the ties loose when you dye otherwise you can get a tie-dye effect, I don't want this at this time. This dye is a "cold water" dye, you don't actually use cold water per se, it is warm but only hand-warm, not really hot to boiling like my other dyes that I use.  I made it up in my dye pot as per the instructions and lowered the skeins of yarn in and followed the instructions for timings etc.

All dyes that I have used, no matter what kind, react with the base colour of the yarn or fabric that you are dyeing so you have to take that into account and so "standard colour mixing rules" apply i.e yellow + blue = green, yellow + red = orange, blue + red = purple, blue + red + green = brown, you get the idea.  So I know that blue dye on a yellow yarn is going to make green, but what shade of green.  I am hoping, based on the shade of blue dye I've picked, that it might come out leaning toward the olive green tones but I am not familiar with Dylon dyes so I don't really know what their shades are like.

So, its not come out Olive green but its decent but if you look closely its not totally even, a few flecks of yellowy-greeny bits still exist, not bright yellow but not fully green either.  Not what I'd hoped for but it does add interest that I can live with.

Once dry I decided to make the same design shawl I made earlier in the year.  Due to the fact that this one is cotton and smooth and more dense it looks different to the white fluffy acrylic version, its not as cuddly, but that's different fibres for you, they all have their own look and different properties

I've ordered myself something for Christmas - again!

I enjoyed last years Fibre Advent Calendar, I've not spun much of it yet, but I will get to it soon enough.  They've changed it a bit for this year.  There will be only 50g of fibre each day but it will be more luxurious than last years and it will be lower priced too.  I was happy with last years price and the fact that you had 100g a day which meant that you could make something decent with each fibre braid.  I don't really mind it being a smaller amount, I've still ordered one.

Again, its a limited edition of 250 so once its gone, its gone and it won't be dispatched until around about 18th November.

I can't wait to receive this now, sounds intriguing what they've been chatting about on the groups etc and instead of individual slips in the packages we are having a scratch card this year with the details on it.

Multi-coloured and Ecru blanket/throw

I quite enjoyed making the pink/purple/red blanket throw so I am going to make another using an array of colours, still sticking with 12 though, and I am going to take it a little bigger and start with 6 centres of each colour, giving me 72 motifs in total for a 6 x 12 formation.

Again, I made a list and worked it out so that two similar colours were not next to each other and that no two motifs were the same, some are similar but not exactly the same.

As last time, I had all the motifs in piles of 6 based on the centre colour.  I knew that this time I was just making it longer and it would be a 6 x 12 formation, which then means that the piles of motifs need to be in two rows of 6 to begin with.  I then arranged them by centre colour, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark and then second row dark, light, dark, light, dark, light and then made sure the colour type were well spread as best I could as I didn't really have 6 light and 6 dark, more like 5 and 7.  

Leaving the bottom motif where it was I then took each pile from the first row and placed it in the third row but dropping it down by one motif and I done this for each pile in turn, row by row until all 72 motifs were out.  Then I had the task of making sure that no two motifs next to each other had the same colour last row and if I did I find that then I always swapped with another with the same centre colour and I kept going until I was happy with that and then done a check on the middle round and took whatever swaps steps were necessary there. The final step was just to make sure that there weren't large patches of red or purple or whatever in one place and that as best as possible that all colours were are evenly spread out as feasibly possible.  Once happy I used some of the safety pins and I connected each motif in place using one of the chain spaces to make sure they didn't get mixed up.

I tried again to figure out the instructions but they are still not working for me as they are written so I know what the pattern is intended to be and how many repeats are needed its just that the written instructions don't add up and I can't even figure out which bit is wrong due to constant noise from one person or another, and not necessarily in this house, neighbours seem to be constantly mowing grass, drilling into walls, hammering and banging and I can even hear one person's washing machine through the thick concrete wall and it making more noise than the one that's actually inside my own home! Its infuriating!

I didn't take as many work-in-progress photos this time, for some reason, so I don't really have anything to show now other than the photos of it pinned out to dry.  Oh, yes, I added the same edging as last time which was...  "Three rounds, starting with a base round, then a round of V stitches and finally the shell with picot edging, with a special version for the corners".

The photos above show it finished but before blocking and the lower one shows it pinned out blocking to shape.  I haven't gotten any decent photos of it yet, I need to figure out how I want to show it off but I will get them when I can.

Dyeing the Whitefaced Dartmoor for a second time

 A couple of weeks ago I tried to dye some combed Whitefaced Dartmoor wool using some left over cold water dye.  It didn't work.  At best it turned some of the outer-fibres of the hand combed nests a very very pale silver grey but it hadn't gotten down into the inner fibres. Today is the day that I am going to give this fibre some colour.

I am using my usual Greener Shades Dyes and have chosen to dye this at 0.5% dye depth (half a gram of dye per 100g of dry fibre), there is 282g of fibre and the dye is made up of 75% River Blue, 25% Amethyst Purple.

I did loosen the hand combed nests a bit before putting them in the dye pot in the hopes that the dye would reach all of the fibres and I am happy with the results.  The plan is to use this fibre in my own blend and add some other fibres and colours to it to make it more interesting and to add a bit of softness as well.

An interesting patchwork of blue and pink-y purple that I am sure will eventually make an interesting spun yarn and then go on to be made into something that someone would love to buy from me.