Is this woad?

I'm excited about this - I think it may be woad and if so, there may be enough to dye a small amount of wool. Spotted on Gracie's daily walk.

Best bread ever!

At last I've managed to create a very lively and consistently delicious sourdough culture. It's more nutty than sour. I really must look after it carefully now.

Thirty-three Years In the Mastering

Child's jumper knit in indigo dyed cotton

In 1980 my boyfriend was enamoured enough to buy me a wonderful Toyota knitting machine with ribbing attachment - absolutely state of the art back then and I was thrilled and properly enamoured back.

I was young and in a hurry - no time to read instruction manuals and I'm afraid everything I produced was mostly too large or misshapen to be worn. I knit everything from the perspective of a hand knitter and tried to run long before I could walk. The machine was put away and forgotten about until we moved to the countryside.

I tried again in the early 1990s thinking it would be great to knit clothes for my two children. I went to knitting exhibitions and stocked up on lovely yarns I was sure to use. My head was bursting with ideas for patterns. The problem was that I still needed to learn how to use the machine properly and my ideas were very ambitious. The children were demanding of my time and the result was headaches, bad tempers and piles of ravelled yarn. I put all my crafting stuff under the spare bed and forgot about it. I gave most of the yarn away.

The knitting machine has always nagged at the back of my mind but now I was worried that after all these years it wouldn't work. Uppingham Summer school has run machine knitting classes for a number of years with a superb teacher called Beryl Jarvis and this year I joined a class. Beryl told me what I needed to do to get my machine running again and in the meantime I learnt new skills on one of her brother machines.

This little sweater may not look much but I made it in a day, it has come out to the size I was aiming for and I don't have a headache.

Back To Nature

Yally Potting Up The Young Plants

Yally came home this weekend to get back in touch with nature and feel the soil. Here she is potting up the seedlings I grew from seed back in June, they are a bit retarded as they should have been put into larger pots sooner than this. I'm sure with Yally's loving care they will soon recover and be ready for planting out in October. I hope she comes back then to help as I have big plans.
If all goes to plan, the garden should be wonderful by spring next year. I'm so excited.
Dressing gown and pinny are de rigueur for gardening here.

Rudy

This is Rudy coming to meet me after being out for the day.

Six Sox Knitalong

Water Garden Socks

About the same time that I began this blog, I joined the "Six Sox Knitalong" - a Yahoo Group. The idea being to knit six pairs of socks a year. I've failed miserably at that, though I think I managed to keep up with the first three projects. Since then I've dipped in when I felt like it or particularly liked the pattern. This pattern is by Terry Morris but I haven't done it justice by choosing a variegated yarn. I was drawn to the vibrancy of the yarn which is a KnitPicks Stroll Hand Painted. I'm rubbish at guessing how coloured yarns will knit. I suppose it could have been worse, they might have striped.

Golden Monkeys

Monkey Socks knit in KnitPicks Tonal Stroll

The colour of these has grown on me and I always love knitting the Monkey pattern.

KnitPicks Stroll feels more like a man made fibre, rather than 75% wool. It must be something to do with the Superwash treatment. It really does machine wash well but sometimes I wish it felt a little more woolly.

Woman beats husband with distaff!

Woman beats husband
with distaff.

Many years ago when I lived in London, I would regularly visit the library on my lunch break. It was a wonderful distraction from some fairly grim jobs, to pore over the pages of the library's facsimile Luttrell Psalter. I would try to immerse myself in the lives of the 14th century people decorating every page.

I didn't know then that I would be living so close to the village - Irnham - in which the psalter was commissioned.

Recently I've had cause to revisit the psalter and again, I am as engrossed as ever. I'm now a spinner, so this picture caught my eye. I wonder what misdemeanor this man is guilty of to illicit such wrath and beating with the distaff. I bet it involved another woman!

If you don't know the Luttrell Psalter, it's worth taking a look at the British Library pages.

A couple more colours

100 grams of Saxon Blue Dyed Yarn

I'm going to do a bit of research later in the day and try to find out a bit more about Saxon Blue. I'm not sure what it is. I think it has something to do with indigo dying without using a vat.

The dye bath was nowhere near exhausted when this colour was achieved but I didn't know how to get the yarn to take up more colour. Quite a pretty blue but not as deep as I would have liked. I threw in some bicarb as I thought it would help develop the blue. When this didn't work I glugged in a bit of vinegar, it really made everything fizz. By now I was feeling like a crazed alchemist and beginning to worry about the integrity of the yarn after all this faffing. It would be terrible if it all disintegrated in a few days.

I'm planning to over dye some of this as there is 100 grams to play with.

25 grams of Madder over dyed with Saxon Blue

This is half of the yarn I previously dyed with madder extract, now over dyed with the remains of the Saxon Blue bath. Again, the colour uptake wasn't great but I do like this colour.

Beautiful Colour

I'm loving playing with colour, I think mainly because I have much more important stuff to be getting on with.
This was dyed with madder. The aim was for a deep red using Botanical Colors Aquarelle Liquid Dye Extracts. Perhaps my cheap Lidl scales are inaccurate as my calculated 5 grams and a little more for luck on 50 grams of wool, only produced this deep pink when the dye bath was exhausted. It started out an orange colour which I was able to adjust with some bicarb hurriedly found under the sink. It was amazing watching the colour change as I spooned in the bicarb.
Dying really is more fun when playing like this but I shall probably never be able to reproduce these colours again. Also, I'm producing colours which as yet don't go together so I'm not sure what I'm going to make with them. The plan for a shawl is out the window.

Surprise!

25 grams of fabulous woolly yarn

I didn't expect this at all. There was some of the Acacia Gum dye bath left over from the other day so I popped in 25 grams of my freshly mordanted yarn to exhaust it. The colour didn't look very exciting so I added a small glug of some copper water I made years ago. The dye bath looked disgusting - a dreadful, sludgy brown/black so I wasn't hopeful. It still looked horrible when I brought it out of the pan but after rinsing, washing and rinsing again, I was left with this beautiful colour. I think the green became stronger as it was drying. What a shame I didn't dye more.

Getting Ready For Colour

Today I've treated myself to a bit of fibre work. I finished off the 300 grams of Shetland I was spinning for a shawl. So pleased with the quality of the spinning, I think it's the best and most consistent I've ever achieved. Now I'm very much looking forward to dying it all with beautiful vegetable dyes.







This is 100 grams of the Shetland, spun up in the winter. It's dyed with Acacia gum and because I'm not yet a skilled vegetable dyer, more throw it in and hope for the best - it isn't quit the colour I was aiming for. I love it anyway, with that wonderful translucence that comes with vegetable dyes.











The other socks I started in Skopelos are now finished and our holiday is just a distant memory. Yesterday it was so hot here, I didn't open the doors or windows. The heat outside was fierce and I couldn't go out back until after dark.












Yet more socks. This time Cookie A's fabulous Monkeys. The yarn is KnitPicks Tonal Stroll. The yarn isn't as vibrant as I'd hoped and just looks grubby in places. They're fine and I'm sure I'll enjoy wearing them.

Finished Socks

These are the socks I made in Skopelos. I found the yarn in my bag when I got there and it seemed to be just right for knitting on the terrace. The colour is identical to one of the geraniums growing by the pool.













The weather here in England has been fierce today, so I've alternated between cleaning the house and cooling off, finishing these socks.

Breakfast on the beach

Limnonari

Today we had breakfast in a taverna on Limonari beach. There is going to be a wedding reception there this evening and girls were climbing trees to hang fairy lights.
When the taverna first opened there was no road to the beach, access was only by boat.

Yally after breakfast

Villa Antigoni

We spent a couple of hours snorkelling before coming home to lounge around the pool. There is a peacock who yeehaws like a cowboy.

And we're off!

The journey to Skopelos was pretty tiring as the plane left Gatwick around 5am getting us to Volos in time for lunch. We didn't see much of Volos, though it seemed to be a pleasant port.














The ferry journey was a wonderful four hours, the seats were comfortable enough to grab a nap and on deck the breeze was refreshing. There's something very romantic about these ferries, I much prefer them to the SeaCats which feel more like buses. I suppose they are faster and much more expensive.







It was dark by the time we reached the island and there were a few attempts and false starts until we found which steep winding dirt track led to our villa in the mountains. I was a bit stressed. I know, because my glasses steamed up.
It was good to find a bed almost twenty four hours after leaving Lincolnshire.