Actual proper dyeing number two

I decided to do some variegated dyeing using the lovely Bendigo sock yarn hank I bought on special ages ago. It is lovely wool, soft and spongy with a nice twist.



I put down a layer of gladwrap, put the soaked skein on it, then added different coloured dyes to different bits. Actually only two colours - red and blue - with some bits where I mixed them together beforehand. And there were some bits where they mixed together of their own accord. Then I rolled up the gladwrap sausage and boiled it for a bit.



And here is the finished product!



It was a bit bright and kindergartenish, so I dyed another skein without the variegation, just in a plain purple. I thought they might blend well together. The plain purple is still not exactly a solid colour because of the many flaws in my dyeing technique, but it's less vivid than the multicoloured one. I wound them into balls and they look just like bought ones ... I'm very pleased.

Actual proper dyeing





After mucking about with food colouring for a while, I thought it was time to start doing some actual proper dyeing, with actual proper dyes. I bought some acid dyes on-line, read through the completely inadequate instructions, looked at proper instructions thank you google, translated it into metric because I live in a normal country, and wrote it all down.

Actual proper dyeing requires that you weigh the yarn. As you can see, there are two different ones here - the 100% wool cream two ply I got from Bendigo Woollen mills ages and ages ago, and a slightly heavier 50/50 wool acrylic blend from Ice. I was thinking the blend would dye a pastel, and I wanted some nice yellows to go with a variegated wool I have. I dyed it still twisted up in the hank, because I wanted some bits to be dark and some bits to be light.

Actual proper dyeing requires that you have a saucepan that is NOT USED FOR FOOD PREPARATION. I went to the op shop and got a $8 stock pot. It is surprisingly good quality, with nice high sides, a solid bottom and a glass lid.

Then you mix it together and boil it like a bastard. I took this photo through the glass lid, and had my first inkling that this wasn't actually going to be the nice golden yellow that the label said it would be. That this would actually turn out to be very bright and very ugly safety orange.

Except for the blend of course, which went a very nasty apricot. And I wasn't quite expecting there to be so much white left in the wool. So after it had been rinsed and dried I over-dyed it. Basically put it back into a nice sky-blue dye pot, thinking that it would go a pretty green on the orange bits and blue on the white bits.

HELL NO. The wool went bottle green and khaki, with patches of orange still peeping through, and the blend went a very very strange grey! Maybe a greenish grey, but not at all the dainty grass shade I was expecting.  I think I might have boiled some of the yellow out of it? Is that even possible?

I am not too upset because they are definitely colours I will use (maybe not together) but dyeing is just a complete lottery, even with measuring. The only bright spot was that it exactly matches the two large zucchini sitting on the kitchen bench. Camouflage wool, if you ever find yourself in a zucchini patch.

 

This is lovely yarn

It turns out you really do get what you pay for when it comes to wool. This is some Misti Alpaca variegated laceweight that I bought from an actual wool shop in Canberra, and a beautiful silk merino blend that I got from Ice. The silk merino isn't quite as gold as I thought it would be, but still pretty. And the alpaca is beautiful. I wasn't sure how they would be on the warp, because they both have a bit of fluff, but it worked well. 

I did stripes on the warp and alternated one row of each on the weft. It is very soft and light and lovely.

And I still have some of each left over!!! I will have to think of a project for them - perhaps not the two colours together again because I think the gold drained some of the prettiness out of the variegated one. 

Shoe polish, and ancient history

On Sunday I polished five pairs of my black shoes. This doesn't happen very often, so I took a photo as proof. They are not very shiny because I really can't be bothered buffing and buffing, but much cleaner than they were.

And this was the cloth that was used to buff them up with. A t-shirt. An old concert t-shirt - Hunters and Collectors 1993 New Zealand tour. Hunters and Collectors are an Australian band, and my husband is a massive fan (I'd never heard of them before I met him) so he went to the Wellington concert of course, back in 1993, and bought the t-shirt.

So I dug out the old photos because I knew that this favourite t-shirt made several appearances. Here we are on holiday in May 1993 - we went back to Brisbane to see his family. I am wearing a Crowded House t-shirt (although I have never been to one of their concerts, so god knows where I got it from) and a super trendy rock-with-a-hole-in-it necklace. And can you see why my boys have red hair? They had no chance of any other colour, poor things.

Both these photos are on the Sunshine Coast where we went for a day trip with his parents. I am now also wearing highly fashionable John Lennon sunglasses. Look at us, so young and bouncy... 

Hand-dyed

Back in November I dyed some skeins I found already tied up in the cupboard. Blue and black, because I had some in those colours still in balls, so I thought I would use them all together. And I did! And it is lovely, even if a bit mottled. There are blue stripes, and black stripes, and one that has a tiny bit of turquoise. Not an artistic decision, a logistical one based on what was in the drawer.



I put it on a 10 dpi heddle, and it was lovely to weave and made a nice soft scarf. It's still a bit scratchy compared to some of the blends that I'm working with - it's 100% wool which is good in some ways but not as soft as some of the more expensive wools, or when you put a bit of quality acrylic with it. Or mohair, or silk, or alpaca or one of those lovely things.



It lost a bit of colour when I wet finished it, but honestly, about the same as the commercially dyed skeins. I haven't had one single scarf not lose colour with a warm hand wash, no matter where the yarn came from. It makes me feel better about my home dyeing.

Like a substitute teacher at clown school

Which is how number two son described me when I asked him to take photos of me in the new shirt I'd made. In his defence, I had said "could you take photos of me in this terrible shirt I made, it looks ridiculous". I would like to think that if I'd said "could you take photos of me in this wonderful new shirt I made, I'm so proud of myself" he would not have made that comment. But you don't know. Teenagers can be cruel.



So the concept was sound - a loose, cotton shirt in a fairly neutral print that I could wear with jeans as a step up from  t-shirt. But it looks stupid, like a weird kimono / pyjama top. The cotton is a lovely heavy soft fabric, but was way too solid for this type of oversized shirt.

I even made it all totally properly - hand-stitched the yoke facing, pleats and plackets on the cuffs, the whole enchilada. I'm going to put it through the washer and dryer a few times to see if it softens up at all. There might be a dressing on the fabric that makes it stiff ... but I'm guessing not. I'm guessing it's just one of those disasters that seemed like a good idea at the time. Never mind, I quite enjoyed making it, between swims.

Practising my modelling poses or showing off my cuff pleats? You decide.

Beautiful beach weekend

It had been too long away from the beach for me, so I went down last weekend on my own and had a wonderful time. A massive storm came through Friday night with great cracks of lightning, torrential rain and hail; no damage done and quite spectacular. And then the rest of the weekend was just beautiful. There was a huge swell on Saturday - perhaps from the storm? I don't really know how waves work - so I got a couple of excellent swims with my boogy board. Caught some big waves ... or big for our little beach, which doesn't really get big waves. There were a few people on the beach but not heaps.

I sewed a bit, read a bit, watched Russian Doll on Netflix which I enjoyed a lot. Number two son had watched it and said it was quite "adult" (!!!! drugs and sex mostly, not entirely appropriate for a fourteen year old but what are you going to do) He got suckered in and had to binge watch all eight episodes, and so did I. 

This is a sunset shot. We don't usually get the sky reflected in the water quite as perfectly. It was very pretty.

And much much nicer than Canberra yesterday which had horrible winds and a hideous dust storm. There is normally a city behind that red haze. The winds blew over several large trees, and the red dust was on everything. Worse air quality than Beijing apparently! Back to lovely blue skies today, although the outdoor furniture is a bit grimy.

Linen wool blend

I can't actually remember why I bought this from Ice, I suspect it was on serious sale. And it didn't look at all attractive on the website, or even in the ball, but it wove up just beautifully.



It is very fine, so I set it reasonably close, and it turned out light and soft, but still with a bit of heft. The little random flecks are nice, and give it a bit of interest. It is 60% wool, 25% viscose, 12% linen and 3% polyester. It is quite likely that the coloured flecks are the polyester.



It was very soothing just to make something from all one type of wool, and see how it weaves up on its own. I am not sure what else I would put it with? Something soft, definitely. I still have four balls left, so plenty of room for experimentation.

The new enthusiasm

I've mentioned before that number two son has all-encompassing enthusiasms. They can last for weeks or months or years, there can be several at a time, and they always seem to involve considerable on-line shopping. And we are never quite sure what it's going to be. Thomas the Tank Engine was probably foreseeable for a four year old boy, and Doctor Who for a seven year old boy, but the Great Washi Tape explosion came out of a clear blue sky, as has the latest one. Succulents.

Yep, he's started indoor gardening. This is the top of the chest of drawers in his room. Did you know you can buy succulents on-line? I was not aware of this until they started arriving in the mail. There are little cutting nurseries on the outside table from plants we had in the garden.

He has also cadged cuttings from elderly neighbours when he's walking the dog, and bought them at farmer's markets. Somewhere there is a carnivorous plant. We are absolutely encouraging this hobby, especially because you can leave succulents for weeks at a time without watering, and some of them are very pretty.

I have been including the boys less and less on this blog as they get older, which is the right thing to do I think, but honestly they do quite as many interesting and strange things as teenagers as they did when they were toddlers. Number two son makes himself a large iced coffee every morning, puts it in a cup with a straw and carries it to school. Every morning. Strange....

The other Berlin wool

My husband bought me some other very lovely wool in Berlin - beautiful dyed skeins - one in a mid-red and one in a deep purpley red. I posted about it when I was winding it in to a ball with my excellent ball winder (I've done a lot of winding now and I LOVE IT, it makes the most delightful centre pull balls) but you couldn't really see the colour.

 This is the finished scarf. It was wonderful to weave. Clean, stretchy but not too much, soft but solid and such pretty colours. Decent quality wool is really delightful. As opposed to my photography. I thought if I folded it, and put it on the laundry basket, it would be better. But it's not.



It's a houndstooth, not that the pattern is very clearly defined. Houndstooth is becoming my go-to pattern when I want to blend a couple of colours together in an interesting way. And it's super easy.

What I've been reading - the second half of 2018

Since I delighted the internet with my reading list of the first half of 2018, I should keep going and let you know what I read in the second half. Definitely fewer books! 42 compared to 61. I think because some of them were quite solid and took a while to get through ... but it might be because of the loom purchase. Books are down, Netflix is way way up.

So here is the list, in the reverse order that I read them in:

Jennifer Saunders	Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
David Lodge	A Man of Parts
A.S. Byatt	Ragnarok
Charlotte Bronte	Villette
Terry Pratchett	Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8)
Catherine Lowell	The Madwoman Upstairs
David Profumo	Bringing The House Down: A Family Memoir
Nigel Williams	R.I.P.
Daphne Merkin	The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags
Claire Fuller	Bitter Orange
Juliet Barker	The Brontes
Barney Norris	Turning for Home
Matt Haig	How to Stop Time
Brian Martin	Holt College: An Oxford Novel
Jonathan Bate	Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
Angela Meyer	A Superior Spectre
Tim Winton	Eyrie
Pamela Holmes	The Huntingfield Paintress
Gail Godwin	Grief Cottage: A Novel
Audrey Niffenegger	Her Fearful Symmetry
Joshua Ferris	The Unnamed
Frank Herbert	Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)
Tim Winton	The Boy Behind the Curtain
David Nicholls	Us
Damon Tweedy	Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
Juliet Marillier	Dreamer's Pool (Blackthorn & Grim #1)
Jacqueline Lunn	The Unknown Woman
Jennifer Egan	A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan	Manhattan Beach
Jane Harper	Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2)
Katharine Murphy	On Disruption
Douglas Coupland	Generation A
Lionel Shriver	Property: A Collection
Julia Baird	Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
A.M. Homes	May We Be Forgiven
Victoria Glendinning	Rebecca West: A Life
Virginia Woolf	To the Lighthouse
Sally Brampton	Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Laura Shapiro	What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
Philip Hensher	Kitchen Venom
Fredrik Backman	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises
Philip Hensher	Tales of Persuasion

As usual, it is all over the place. Literary, light, non-fiction, biography, memoir, old, new. I do sometimes follow trails; you can see a Bronte theme, and the biography of Leonard Woolf I read at the beginning of the year led to both To the Lighthouse and Rebecca West, which then led to A Man of Parts, which is about H.G. Wells (and it's great, by the way, highly recommend). Janet Malcolm's biography of Sylvia Plath (which isn't on this list for some reason, clearly my system is not infallible!) led to the Hughes biography. Both very good books but clearly there are a number of perspectives you can take on those two lives. 

If I had to pick the three best - to be honest I can't even remember what most of them were about, which tells you something - it would be Tim Winton's Eyrie, Julia Baird's biography of Queen Victoria and Sally Brampton's memoir. My criteria for a good book is that it made some kind of memorable impact, which isn't very scientific, but there you have it. None of them were dreadful (I don't finish bad books, I just stop reading, and they don't go on my list) but some were a bit forgettable.