Finally - Success with Purple Cabbage!

After several attempts on different yarns: cotton, wool, silk, soy, mohair, I managed to successfully dye yarn with Purple Cabbage.

It doesn't sound remarkable except that the Purple Cabbage gives great colours in the pot and then they wash out (cotton) or fade out quickly in light (silk) or hang around for a while (wool) then fade to greige or take only the slightest tint (mohair).

Then there is soy yarn. For some reason Soy loves to be dyed. I am yet to understand why but it is so easy to dye its amazing.

Unfortunately I had only about 20 grams of soy yarn left, so I needed more for a proper test. After months of searching, I found a 70% wool 30% soy yarn. I decided to give it a go hoping the percentage of soy was enough. And yes, it was.

Furthermore the soy enjoyed all the things the wool didn't like such as changing the acidity of the dye bath to make different colours.

So happily I have blue, purple and pink from one dye bath just by adding different things to alter the acidity. I added soda ash to make blue, nothing to make purple (clearly my tapwater is fairly neutral) and a little vinegar to make pink.

The darkest shades were the first dye batch (24 hours) then the paler shades were the second use of the same dye bath (48 hours).

Unfortunately I made the decision to solar dye rather than refrigerate the dye jars. In this nice tropical heat the dye baths fermented and smelt rather like rotten eggs. Not pleasant, but the colours were worth a little nausea!

Earth Meets Sky

My annual journey back home provided much inspiration in terms of colour and texture.  I plan to develop some of these colours in my dyeing work and the textures perhaps in some other projects.

Blue Hydrangeas in the evening garden take on the hue of the sky. The colour seems almost limit-less.

Sunrise over the great desert that is Australia's centre. The glow was so much more orange that my camera could cope with. It was like peach icecream.

The airplane was quiet as everyone else was sleeping. I snuck up the shades to take a picture. Its strange to think of the earth below rotating as we fly over it in the atmosphere. 

A little beetle I met. He was such amazing colours - reds and greens and yellows.

This little pond is a coppery green owing to the mineral content of the water. The pond was full of ducks and little fish.

Recycled brick pathways have always been a favourite of mine. This one was multi-hued red to orange and almost green. The day was warm so the path was radiating heat.

The farm-scape near where I live. The old fields follow the undulations of the land. The new fields follow the circle of the irrigation spray. A multitude of crop colours, mostly veggies or grazing. The white fields are probably poppies grown for medicine.

Sometimes you look out the window on the plane and see strange and beautiful cloud formations. 

The night sky at my parent's house is so dark you can see the stars. Here is Orion's belt.

The Bridestowe Lavender farm was extraordinary. The colour of the lavender complemented the purple of the mountains and the red of the soil. And it smelt wonderful.

Shadow of a woolen lace shawl I saw at the Tasmanian Wool Centre at Ross, Tasmania. I also brought some beautiful handspun undyed black wool there. They also have a wool museum where you can touch different microns of wool and see some of the world record breaking long staples from different sheep.

This yellow lichen never fails to amaze me with its colour. This is growing on a 150 year old gatepost in Oatlands, Tasmania.

The deep dark sky fades to light cloud. I am reminded of Hiroshi Sugimoto's amazingly beautiful scarves for Hermes when I see this. 

The shallows of the bay make strange forms.

Ignore Everything and Look at Pretty Yarn

Isn't this the most lovely thing you have seen?

I finally made a 'natural' green dye for yarn.

Its magnificent.

Its a celery green colour. Quite vegetal.

I made it from copper, vinegar and lots of time (about 3 months). I'm not sure what the chemical name is for this but I think its Copper Acetate. Not sure if its poisonous, so I wore gloves and rinsed the yarn very well.

The dye is actually a blue green colour but this skein is under-dyed with black tea and so was yellowish. Thus mixing blueish and yellowish I made green.

This is the copper wire soaking in vinegar about 2 months in. You can see the bright blue colour of the vinegar below and the crystals forming on the wire.

This is the copper wire after I took it out after 3 months. After this stage I soaked the wire in a little water to remove the blue from the wire. Worked really nicely.

On the left is yarn that was not under-dyed with anything, its just a natural wool colour. The finished yarn colour is much closer to blue than green.

This was my first experiment with wool in a tiny amount of the blue liquid that showed me that the colour would stick and might produce greens or blues. 

Happiness.

A Winter Scarf for my Mama

I wanted to make my mother something special for Mother's Day. So I decided to weave her a scarf as amazing as she is.

The red (warp) is fingering weight merino while the colourful weft is chunky weight hand painted wool which I brought in Canada (though the yarn is from Germany!).

This is the third thing I've woven after my sample piece and I'm happy with how it turned out. As I was doing the calculations by myself for the first time, I wasn't quite sure that it would turn out nice. I was worried the fabric would be too stiff, but it is just nice.

The colours are really lovely too. I enjoyed weaving with the colourful weft yarn because I enjoyed seeing the colours emerge so much!

Grey is Not Boring

Grey is Not Boring!

The love affair I have with grey continues. This delightful hat is made from handspun alpaca that I got from here. Its pretty rough handspun and still contains lots of little bits of straw that I had to pick out while knitting. The spinning is also uneven so some parts of the hat are thicker and some parts thinner. Also the colour is not consistent, if you look closely you can see the top of the hat is slightly darker than the edges. This is all part of the charm of handspun for me. This wool was spun by a human not a machine. A human with hands and alpacas and bits of straw everywhere and probably she stopped for lunch and the family dog slept on it as well. Its real and that's what I like about it. Wabi-Sabi sort of beautiful.

One of my professors recently said that the most rebellious thing you can do now in terms of design and art and theory is to simply make something because its beautiful. I like this because its something I've been feeling for some time. Why must art be ugly to be poignant and thoughtful and interesting? Why can't it be beautiful?

This wool is beautiful. I think the spinner intended it to be so despite the straw and unevenness. This I hope comes through in the hat. I just wanted a texture that would show off the wool as it is. The cables of the hat kind of fade away into the background and the wool and greyness of it come forward.

The pattern is called 'Gretel' by ysolda in the latest Stitch n' Bitch book. Even though I haven't done much cabling before the pattern was really easy to follow and went without a hitch (except for not being able to do the tubular cast on successfully even with 5 attempts!)

The Underside of the Hat.

Chroma Chronos I-VI

A while back I posted about a project I was working on, dyeing postcards with tea and matching them with my naturally dyed wools. It was actually for an exhibition called Pameran Poskad which I took part in. The exhibition was held from the 17th April to the 01 May here in Singapore. Anyone could take part so I decided that since it was my new year's resolution to make some art, I would take part. The exhibition was interesting and gathered a huge response from artists from different places around the world. You can see some pictures at the website of works submitted. It was nice for me as a 'little' person to participate with all the 'grown up' artists. And to my surprise I sold 3 of my works! Woo! I'm a selling artist! Hee hee!

Here's what my works were about:

Chroma Chronos was a set of works about time and colour (hence the name chroma=colour, chronos=time (yes its deliberately mis-spelt to emphasis the link between the two)). I wanted to reflect the process, the hidden dimension of the work, which is the time. Each of the four colours on each postcard took up to 2 weeks to develop, meaning that the total time spent for each postcard was up to 8-9 weeks. This is not fast art, not the quick and dirty colour of the inkjet printer, digital photography and the instant download, but the slow, painstaking (and often frustrating) art of time. With time comes colour. The two are tied together. Time itself breathes into these works. The works are circular to reflect the nature of the clocks which rule our days, hands going around and around and around. The circles also stem from my preoccupation with geometry and philosophy (but I wont bore you with that too!). Without further ado, I present Chroma Chronos I-VI:

Someone brought this one

And someone brought this one too

Someone brought the small yellow one too!

Chroma Chronos I - VI

Of Green and Blue

Though the blogging has been quiet, I've still been making. And as you can see by the photos I'm clearly going through a green & blue phase. They are nice calming colours for my stressful busy life at the moment.

I finally finished the Knitted Jacket which I started back in January. It had a short hiatus for a month or two (when I got tired of it) but I finished it in June:

Hem detail. The three rows of K1P1 ribs weren't enough to keep the hem down, so I also added a couple of rows of single crochet worked in crab stitch (backwards). This did the trick.

The double thickness neckline made with two strands held together.

I really like how the collar turned out. I actually hated this jacket for a while (as often happens after you are closely involved with something for too long) but now I love it. I'm going to wear it with a slim fit long sleeved t-shirt underneath.

The finished jacket. I made the sleeves about half as wide as the pattern requested and didn't do the garter stitch band. I made up one sleeve first and it just looked too big and silly on me (like I was wearing someone else's jacket). So I had to rip it out and try it again a few times. I also just finished the sleeves the same way as the jacket with the K1P1 ribs. The sleeves are still a wide fit, even at half the width (plus I have very stick-like arms, so I didn't want to make my arms look even thinner by making big sleeves!)

Also finished: a scarf and matching hat. This is made of very lovely chunky wool which is from Jaeger (and is probably discontinued as I heard they were sold/brought over or something).

The hat pattern is from 'Cool Crocheted Hats' and I just did one less set of shell pattern to compensate for the chunky wool (and my small head!)

The scarf uses the same (well, similar) shell pattern, I just made this up as I went along. I think it turned out nice. Its kinda leafy.

The Mr. also needed a hat and scarf set. For him I made this out of a really soft cashmere/silk/merino blend. It feels amazing.

Both the hat and scarf are my own patterns. The puff stitch gives the hat a little texture and shape as the Mr. has a very square flat sort of head and it needed to be rounded out a bit.

The Mr's set. You can see from this photo that the hat looks really bunchy, but it actually sits flat on the head. Please appreciate this, as it took me about 4 goes to make this hat just perfect!

the very very long necklace

So I was tired and unwell and it seemed like a good idea: just take a ball of nice wool cotton and keep knitting i-cord until the ball runs out.

And it was a good idea. It turned out really nice, it just took a while to knit.

I knit it up on 3.0mm needles in a flecked grey which gives it some interest in terms of texture. It measures over 10m long and I have been wearing it simply looped around like a coil of rope. I tried plaiting it but it ends up too thick and stiff with no movement. I'm planning on making a leather clasp to cover the knot at the back where I simply tied the two ends together. I've got a small scrap of deep red leather that will look great as the clasp.

Rectangle

I picked up this piece of grey woolen fabric at a factory outlet in Melbourne and the beige linen is from a Muji pillowcase. This skirt really is a rectangle, with linen on the inside and wool on the outside. I draped and folded it around myself to find the optimum angle for the drape and chalked it out and sewed it. The top is fastened with studs. I was going to make it reversible but I didn't like the beige on my skin-tone and the wool would be very scratchy against the skin. I'm very happy with the combination of textures and colours and being grey, it goes nicely with pretty much everything else in my wardrobe. Thus continues my fascination for the colour grey and its friends beige and black.

The whole skirt with its asymmetrical hemline

The linen flap drapes over the wool when worn

Stitching and fabric detail - I'm getting better at sewing straight!

The side seam and studs - normally hidden under the fold flap

Detail of the studs - the first time I've used studs and it worked out nicely

A sneak peek at my new project

I am about to embark on my first quilt. Wish me luck! I've done my planning and scheming and washing. The fabric is Anna-Maria Horner's Good Folks Collection. I love the colour combinations and the prints, they are old-fashioned and modern at the same time. The squares of good folks will be supplemented with some plain squares (to make a king-sized quilt cover) and the back will be some gingham or something suitably random.

I was inspired partly by the beauty of the colours and the fabric, and partly by Denyse Schmidt's quilts. Her book is great and really easy to understand. It makes me think that I can do this! Hopefully this notion is not mis-lead and it shall all turn out well!