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.

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?

Derived from the leaves of the Indigo plant, there are a few different varieties. I use a certified organic Indian Indigo, Indigofera Tinctoria. The Japanese strain of Indigo has the botanical name of Polygonum Tinctorium, and is also known as Dyers Knotweed.  Australia also has it’s own indigenous Indigo, known as Indigofera Australis. It is a rather gorgeous shrub, and has delicate purple flowers in the springtime. For the gardeners out there, it likes a well drained position in half shade.

Working with Indigo requires patience, and persistence. When you dye with Indigo, you are required to re-dip your piece to build up the colour, and leave it to oxidise fully between dips. Repeated dipping also improves it’s wash and light fastness.  All of my work receives at a minimum 3 dips in the Indigo vat. The darker shades are built up over many more dips, and a piece I worked on recently had around 15 dips to reach the desired shade. That patience I mentioned earlier was starting to wear a touch thin by the end of that piece!

Indigo, while tricky to work with, is a great natural dye to begin your journey with. It is a lovely colour, it is challenging, and working with it is extremely satisfying.  If you’d like to learn more about working with Indigo, I do teach one day workshops, which will be starting up again in the springtime. If you’d like to come along and dip your proverbial toe in the vat (not your real toe, it WILL turn blue) then you can drop me a line via my contact page to be notified when classes are available for booking.

Here’s a little taste of the Indigo process, enjoy!

Fustic and Indigo green is The Best. This shade of green makes me slap my face a la Macaulay Caulkin and rather than scream, I kind of just go “eughaaargh” and make other nonsense noises because words just cannot explain how good it is.

Growing up in Australia I’m used to seeing stereotypical images of our bush (that’s Aussie for forest for any international readers), the ones where the ground is brown, the tree is brown, and the leaves are a dull greenish silver, or just army green. It does have it’s beauty and if you’re an art fan, please go look up John Glover. He’ll make you slap your face a la Macaulay as well.

For most of my life I have always found green rather boring, unless it was a beautiful foreign forest green, the kind I have never seen a great deal of living here. So imagine my incredible delight when I thought to myself “perhaps I will try a green” and stumbled upon this loveliness. Since I have it has opened my eyes to it in the Australian landscape too. Now I see it everywhere. It flashes out at me like little emerald gems that were once secreted away because to see them always would tarnish their beauty.

I know I say this about every colour, but I think it’s my favourite. It is however a harder colour to achieve. Well, it’s not really hard per say, it’s just that it takes longer to achieve, because you have to dye your textile twice. In the world of natural dyes that means in whatever order you choose to work, you effectively dye your work three times, because fustic requires a mordant first. If you want to do it on cotton, it means 3 mordants and 2 dye jobs! That is just crazy, what kind of lunatic would spend that much time dyeing something?

Me.

I have never been a yellow person. It is just NOT my colour. If I try to wear something yellow, I look hideously ill, it’s terribly unbecoming. That was however, until I discovered Fustic.

My experience with fustic has given me astoundingly beautiful mustard tones of yellow, which deepen in shade quite quickly depending on the amount of dye used. It’s a very economical dye, a little goes a long way. It is another dye I enjoy the smell of, it’s hard to describe, but the word that springs to mind first is sticky. Which is fitting, because it does create a rather sticky goo when you first add water to it. So it has a sticky tannin smell. Maybe a bit like old dried cow dung? That sounds unpleasant and I’m sure my husband thinks it reeks horribly, but once again I do not. The smell of cows and dirt and grass and trees with a hint of woodsmoke? Maybe none, or all of those things! I shall leave that up to you to decide if you try dyeing with it.

Fustic works well on all the fibres I have tried. It gives a brighter yellow on alpaca, a bright chartreuse I would call it, and a mustard on merino.  It also gives a mustard on cotton, and like all natural dyes, changes depending on the light. Fustic has that lovely glow that all natural dyes in my experience have. Synthetic dyes just can’t beat it.

Fustic has good to excellent wash and light fastness on protein fibres, and seems to be doing well on my cotton too.

Last, but not least, when you marry fustic to indigo, you get a beautiful green offspring that is so green, even pine trees get jealous. I’ll be blogging that love story soon.

I have always found the colour red to be immensely appealing.  It’s bright, yet dark, it glows, but can be sombre. It’s the colour of love, blood, danger, the desert and fire engines. It means different things and triggers different emotional responses depending on the context in which it is used.

Possibly the loveliest part of dyeing with madder, is the smell of it. It has a rich earthy sweet smell, and it just smells red!  Standing at the stove, checking my dye, breathing in the sweet earthy aroma makes me feel really connected to what I am working on. It conjures up a sense of well being and warmth, contentment and pleasure.

If I was a religious person I would say it feels like a prayer. Standing at the stove, feeling the heat, breathing in the dye’s scent, it centres me and makes me calm. I imagine it’s how a chef feels when they are concocting a culinary masterpiece, and all the flavours come together just so, and they can smell it, and they know the joy of what they’re making before it is done.

Madder is a traditional dye plant and it’s use has been dated as far back as 2000 BC.  The dye is present in the root of the plant, and is cultivated in 3 year intervals. I would love to grow my own madder for use, but the 3 year wait to then harvest has dissuaded me so far.

All my experiments with Madder root have been on merino and alpaca yarns. I would like to attempt a Turkey Red on cotton one day, but the length of time and investment involved in using it with a plant based fibre is daunting to say the least. I will do it eventually, even if just to say that I have.

Madder root is quite a weak dye and requires a lot of it for depth of shade. It can make for a bit of a thrilling dye experience because then if you screw up, you know you might as well have set some money on fire instead! The upside however when it works out is you get a brilliant deep red, and you can then use the dye bath again and again to achieve lighter shades. The lighter corals, peaches and pinks are quite lovely, and are just as colourfast.  They remind me of the roses that grow in the front yards around Moreland at the end of summer.

Madder is considered to be very light and washfast, and can be good to use as a control sample when testing other dyes for the same. The most important technical thing to remember when you dye with Madder Root is to not let it get too hot, or your colour will not be as pleasantly vibrant.

Enjoy your dyeing with Madder! Don’t forget to take a moment to relax, breathe it in, and let it’s earthy wonderfulness wash over you.

Merino throws dyed with Madder available in the shop!

Before I began to make items for sale and had a “real” job, I had no idea the length of time it takes to create the things that we use in everyday life.  If I needed something I could just go to the shops and buy whatever I needed, and I could buy it for very little money. And I still can. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to go and buy something that has been mass produced and then sold for less than $20. I imagine many many hands have touched that item, and how can it have been produced for so little and a profit still be made? It doesnt make sense that it could have been; not without corners being cut, and somebody not receiving adequate payment for their work.

So I try to buy handmade items where I can, or items that have been produced ethically, and I particularly enjoy buying work that has been made locally.

All my work is produced slowly. I buy my supplies in as close to a raw state as I can manage. Everything I sell began it’s life in an undyed, neutral state.  It takes time for it to become the finished item that I sell. Sometimes a very long time, depending on what it is.

I kind of like that about it. Everything I make is crafted individually, or very close to individually.

It’s nice to work this way. I get to enjoy whatever I create while I create it. I shape it, and it shapes me.

I’ll slowly be adding the time it takes for an item to be made to my store descriptions. I think it’s nice to know how something was made, and be given the opportunity to be mindful of its humble beginnings.

This weekend I will be at Bend and Snap Market at 1000 £ Bend on Sunday. I’ve got some new goodies in the shape of merino gloves to unveil, dyed with Indigo, Madder and Cochineal. They’re pretty spesh, and super warm.

I’ll also have a few merino scarves dyed with Madder and Cochineal as well as a bunch of yarn of differing bases, as well as my Indigo. Busy busy! I’ve got the yarn mordanting on the stove as I write this post in fact!

If you’ve been nosing around the shop lately you’ll see that I have a few silk scarves on sale. These will be available at the sale prices at the market, as well as a few others that haven’t been listed in the shop yet, and some eco prints. Ooh! And I also have some home wares that are yet to make a website appearance! Gees I really should get cracking and put all this stuff in the shop!

I also did a little interview a few months back with the organisers of Bend and Snap. Click here to have a read of it. 

I started dyeing yarn because I wanted great coloured yarn for all the knits I make for my son. He wears a lot of vests, and he looks cute as a button in them!

Anyway, with my conquering of the Indigo vat I decided to start sticking yarn into it, and then also thought about other natural dyes that I’ve been itching to try. With the help of a fantastic customer who basically said to me “have at it, I’m sure it will be great!” I have, in the past week also tried my hand at dyeing with Madder and Cochineal.

Ah yarn. Yarn love! Such glorious colours from such wonderful natural dye sources. I also dyed some yarn with Eucalyptus, continuing my experiments with that as a dye source.

I’m pleased to announce that you can now purchase yarn via the shop, dyed to order.

On another note, if you’re not a follower of my facebook page, (then why not??) but you will have missed that Bend and Snap has been cancelled for this Sunday the 30th of June. I will now be at Bend and Snap market on July 28th 2013. So if you were thinking to yourself “I’m going to go and buy some shibori from Vic this weekend” then you’ll have to do it via the website!