Personality Infusion

After making a couple more felt ball and bead necklaces, I stopped to evaluate. I've got the technique down pat and I'm happy with the length variations I've come up with. The combination of bold bright felt balls with a really light, easy to wear necklace makes me very happy. But I want to infuse a bit more of myself into this design. One way to do that is to dye my own felt balls. That's something I can do as soon as I source some more of them in white. Meanwhile, I came up with this.

It's made with my own handspun yarn combined with hand-dyed (by me) recycled silk loom waste. It's light and bright and I think it's a goer. 

Funky Feet

Here's one of the pairs of socks I showed in yesterdays post--plus colour:The socks and singlets are all done: dyed, rinsed and ready to hang on the line. They were one of the bonuses of this batch of dyeing. The yarn colour samples, which were the main point of the exercise are all dyed, but I've only just started rinsing them. That will take a while and my pile of dirty dishes is growing, so I'll have to make an effort to get them through the sink fairly promptly.

Using dye thickener was my big experiment yesterday. I've had the manutex paste for ages, but never quite got around to trying it. Well, now I've tried it and I'm amazed. Manutex paste plus dye makes something with the consistency of poster paint. And it behaves just like paint as it comes off the brush. It just stays where it is put. That caused me some difficulty with the painted skeins because I had to work fairly hard to cover each strand. On the other hand I was able to make a much clearer distinction between areas of colour than I can with the straight dye. As for fabric, I found myself painting little lines, dots and a heart--just like a kinder kid! The fabric needs to air cure for a couple of days before rinsing, so stay tuned. Meanwhile I'd better get back to the rinsing: three skeins clear and fifteen to go. I'm afraid I'm going to be tired of my sink quite soon.

Kid Mohair Colour

I dyed this skein of kid mohair over the weekend. Here it is draped on my friend's marudai stool , which is sitting near my armchair in the north window--hence the bands of sunlight. I was amazed at how greedy this fibre was for colour. There's about 50 g there. I started off with a generous half teaspoon of Landscape "Cyclamin", only to find the dye exhausted after less than ten minutes. I repeated this twice before I thought the dyeing was done. After it dried and I had another look at it I thought it would take some more, so back to the dye pot it went. This time with a combination of "Galah" and "Plum" from my last silk ribbon experiment. Would you believe it gobbled up all that colour as well. I wouldn't be surprised if it took even more colour, but I like what I've got too much now to want to risk anything else. I was originally going to include this skein with the "Bubble and Squeak" project, but now I think I'll give it a little project of its own. Stay tuned for further developments.