One of the personal projects I am working on at the moment is to make a Pojagi for my bedroom window. For the last year or so we’ve lived with the outside blind shut on our bedroom window, because street lights flood our room and it seems I can only sleep when lights are not shining in my face.

However, I am a lover of light during the day. And I’ve been living like a mole. So the blind is up and the light is coming in. Now a Pojagi does not really prevent much light from entering at all. Which is great! It’s going to be more of a privacy screen, and then at the window edges I’ll use some thicker linen to block the light that creeps around the edges of the indoor blind.

Anyway that is why I have recently been doing some dyeing with Madder roots. For my pojagi I wanted to do some nice subtle pale pinks with some pale greys…well clearly I underestimated my dye strength this time around. In the past I’ve always used a pre-ground powder, so 50g of dye basically dyed next to nothing. This time I went for the roots and chopped them myself.

The nitty gritty for my dye friends out there:

• Soaked whole roots overnight and strained off water (saved*)
• Chopped with scissors a few chunky roots, then chucked it all in a blender with a bit of water. Keep it runny or you blender wont love you.
• Put the resulting madder root milkshake into a big stainless steel cooking pot with some hot tap water and gave it a stir. Immersed my pre-mordanted fabrics and left overnight. (I went and turned my fabric about 3 times before i went to bed)
• On the second day I slowly brought the temp to about 55 degrees. I’m notoriously bad at measuring anything, so it may have been hotter or cooler. I could comfortably hold my hand in there for about 10 seconds.
• Turned off the heat and left overnight, turning the fabric whenever I remembered.
• The third day I checked my colour, and amazingly my PH with my new PH meter. It was sitting somewhere around 7 (it’s been a few days and I never write stuff down!!). I thought it was a bit too orange, so I added about a teaspoon of lime, turned on the heat for about 20 minutes (it didnt get as hot as on day 2), stirred. then left it for a few hours.
• I checked my PH after I took out my cloth and it was sitting at 7.6. So i feel like even with the addition of lime, I didn’t shift the colour too far past what it should be at neutral.

The PH is actually quite interesting to me. I’ve checked my tap water and our regular PH is about 8. It makes me wonder if the madder root itself lowers the PH of the water, or if my water was just a bit off the day I tested it, and normally it does sit closer to neutral. I’m sure I’ll get around to testing it again at some point.

Premordanting:

• Linen and silk / cotton were premordanted with soy.
• Silk organza mordanted with none / alum for a few hours (cold immersion) and alum overnight (cold immersion) alum not measured (few teaspoons?)

*Pre root chopping water – This water is said to be quite orange, which is why it gets tipped off and not used for dyeing. I decided to test this theory, and yep! It is orange. Very orange. If you want to dye orange, use your madder root soak water. I put my unmordanted silk in this, and left it in the sun in a metal pot for a day and night. It was pretty orange. I then added this piece to the main dye pot because I wasn’t a fan, but i cut a sample off first.

I’m planning on doing the grey with logwood, or maybe cutch. Crossing my fingers for not purple.

Exhaust Dyes are below. Left overnight and then brought up to 60 for 20 mins.

It was my 7 year wedding anniversary this year, and the traditional anniversary gift is wool. For the past year I’ve been saying to my husband “I want to buy the fleece of a sheep and have it handspun, and then make something for all of us from it.” Well it got to mid February and I was kind of “this is going to be a pain”. So we nixed the idea and went with the modern gift (pen and ink) and got tattoos instead. We’re nothing if not romantic in a body modification forever sort of way.

I still wanted to do something wooly so I also knit him a beanie and bought us a beautiful sheepskin from Tarndie. When I say us, I do mean “me”.

BUT, and here’s the thing – I also got it into my head to try spinning. So I ended up buying more fleece than would fit on one sheep and it’s lying around my studio in bags of all colours and various stages of cleanliness.
I tried out spinning using a drop spindle first, which is extremely frustrating. I was all set to keep at it, but on visiting my lovely friend Bonny at Kraftkolour last week, she loaned me a gorgeous Kromski Fantasia spinning wheel to try out. and IT IS SO MUCH FUN!!!

I’ve learned how to make rolags from fleece I scoured myself(!!) which takes forever, by the way.
I have learned what woolen spun and worsted spun means, and that you can sort of do something in the middle if you spin from the fold (which has been my preferred method so far). I have learned about S twists, and Z twists and that if you ply 2 S twists together using a S twist you end up with something pretty skewed.

I’ve spun merino, corriedale, polwarth and alpaca. I’ve spun thick and thin and I’ve done some plying. How exciting is plying? Especially with 2 different colours!! I’m so keen to keep going with it and spin something truly garment knit worthy.

I really have loved everything I’ve learned along the way. I really think it’s through the process of trying new things and learning new things, often unrelated (or perhaps the connection was never made?) that you suddenly have a light bulb moment and think “Ah! So that’s why that does that!” And instead of inching along in your practice, you can finally sprint for the next hurdle, instead of slowly stumbling towards it.

One thing I have always done with this blog is to limit it, to only talk about work, or things that closely resemble work. This year I’d like to share more than just work. I want to share personal projects, personal discoveries and dreams, and to not just limit the blog to things I make for sale.

My reason behind this is that every experience we have shapes who we are, and the things that we create. By only sharing work, I’m forcing myself to work inside such a rigid framework that it can be very hard to break out of – and I end up sharing nothing at all. Some of the things that shape my work never have their story told, and I’d like to share them.

Anyone who follows me on instagram knows that I am a huge knitter. I love it. Being able to knit has opened up a whole new world of fashion for me. The action of knitting, the patterns, the yarn have all combined to give me a new appreciation of clothing, fibres, textiles; and I’ve also gained new viewpoints on what fashion is, what sustainability is, and how this speaks to the environment. It’s changed my wider outlook on society as a whole, and has made me consider things like the economics of the wool industry, China, India, wages, animal rights, and the list goes on.

I also sew (obviously!), and I really love making my own clothes. There’s so much I don’t know, but I’d like to share those personal projects here as well. I don’t intend on ever designing or selling my own line of clothes, I’m just a dabbler, and I like well made simple outfits – stuff I rarely find at the shops. I also like to think about where my clothes came from – were the workers paid sufficiently? Do they have to work 12 hours a day to feed their family? Is the dye house taking environmental precautions? Where was it made? Do children work in the factory – etc. It seems much easier to circumnavigate these issues if i make as much as I can myself.

Gardening. As an adult I have been wanting to grow my own food for awhile – but as a renter I put it off. Whenever I began a garden we would inevitably end up having to move, and the loss was always such a downer that I vowed to not do it again until we owned our own home. Last October we found out that our landlords are quite happy living overseas thanks very much and don’t intend on moving back for at least a few more years – so we have some sort of permanence before we can buy something permanent!

So I started a garden. And I LOVE it. I’d go so far as to say it has become an obsession. It began as one garden bed (albeit a large one), and has grown in size and now encompasses 4 more raised beds, and 4 more garden beds. Yikes! It’s producing lots of veggies, and i think we will have more than we can eat. I hope to store some of it for over the winter, I need to learn about root cellars. So prepare yourselves to see my love of all things plant.

These are just some of the things I hope to share more of in 2016. I’m already dubbing this year “the year of personal projects”. I really plan on focusing a lot of energy making things for the joy of it, hopefully at a ratio of “one for me, one for you.”

In my last post I touched briefly on the fact that I’ve picked up a lot of new stockists lately. Which is so totally fabulous and I am so proud to have my work at each and every one of them.

The downside to it though, is I have really been making the same thing quite a bit for the last few months and I really need to call a time out and be newly creative again.  I love my current designs and I don’t think I’ll stop making them anytime soon, but I’d like to add to them. Grow on from them and let them change as I learn new stuff.

I’m a reasonably time poor person, well I think I am. I have a small child who increasingly demands more of my attention and rightly so. My son is 4 and this is his last year at home with me before he starts school. This is our LAST year together where we get to hang out all the time and go to the park, and play and pretend we’re cats, dance and sing along to Taylor Swift (yes I really just admitted that) and just be best friends. Yes these things will carry on as he grows older, but we’ll never live this time again and something I think about increasingly as I get older is “this is it”. I won’t ever get to spend a year with my 4 year old son again.

So, this year I am only going to work, on “work” days. Trust me, this will be challenging. Right now I’m watching Peg + Cat while I write this blog post.  I’m a multi tasker at heart, but I’ve come to recognise that it’s tiring and I just can’t keep doing it if i want to remain sane!

To kick off my more relaxed way of living in 2015, next week I am going on a creative holiday. And I can’t wait! I have so many colours in my head, so many techniques I want to try out, so many product ideas to play with and so much learning and experimenting to do. It’s going to be seriously great. And with me being on holiday, I will hopefully have time to blog more about what I’m up to creatively.

Some of the things I’m hoping to work on are some new home wares, some knitting, naturally dyed colours besides indigo and whatever else I can dream up when I have the mental space to dream of it.

It’s going to be so awesome. Have you ever gone on a creative holiday?

Sophie’s jumper was months in planning. I was very sneaky. I ordered some yarn and a swatch book, and then carelessly (carefully) left the swatch book where she would see it, so I would know what colours she liked.  Then a few weeks later, I told her a teensy weensy half lie about doing a garment grading course and could I please measure her? Of course she said yes. I’m very crafty. (Geddit?)

Measurements in hand I used my rudimentary knowledge of garment creation and dreamed up this sweater.

Knit in BK Tweed Loft ( the colour is Stormcloud) on a standard gauge Singer knitting machine and then the pieces were mattress stitched together. Then I picked up the stitches for the hem, cuffs and neckline and hand knit them.

A note for any machine knitters out there thinking of using BK Tweed in your machines. Proceed with caution! It snaps, A LOT. If you’re prepared to knit very slowly and check each row, go for it.  It does look fabulous once done though.

Oh and the fit? PERFECT. :)