Weld Dyed Fleece, Overdyeing and Blending with Evernia Prunastri Dyed Fleece

Plant dye baths often seem to have a lot of colour left in them after the intended material has been dyed, even when a second batch of wool fibres has been simmered in the afterbath.  Appearances can be deceptive, though.  Dark looking baths may actually be spent of their dye potential.  

Weld leaves go on giving yellow to a surprising weight of fibre, so it is usually worth putting one last lot of wool in for a simmer. Evernia prunastri lichen takes so much nurturing to ferment it that it would be a crime not to eke out every drop of pink. These portions of fleece were used to soak up the remaining colour from a season of making these two plant dye baths.  They are locks of Polwarth fleece which got a bit mangled before I learned the knack of scouring them hot enough to get the lanolin out without causing felting.  On the left, the results of two or three lichen afterbaths, on the right, yellows from several weld afterbaths and in the middle, combined colours on locks that had a simmer in both dyes.

"Mmm, pink, orange and yellow, is it, Beaut?"  Elinor Gotland looked dubious.
"A red sky at sunset has colours like these."
I teased out the locks and carded them into rolags, some of each colour, some blending fibres from the different batches together. 
"Never mind a sunset, that Polwarth looks like it got left out in the rain. Us Gotlands are very sensitive, too.   I remember when we did a production of 'The Wizard of Oz' at Aberystwyth University. Some silly bugger special effects student chucked a bucket of water over us and turned the wind machine on full blast, trying to simulate a Kansas tornado.  Took me hours to comb the felting out of my fleece."
The effect of mixing fibres is distinctly different to overdyeing. Despite some felted locks, I managed to hand spin a fine single with occasional matted lumps, then navajo three plyed the skeins to keep solid stretches of colour, one seguing into another.  The intention was to knit a scarf with a grey green top line, a semicircular golden sun bulging on this 'horizon' and swathes of pink and yellow sky beyond it. 

"That's a valley horizon, alright, Beaut."

"OK, I know, I'll frog it, I suppose."

"You could do with a lesson in colour blending, too."  She rummaged in her stash.

"Oh, give over, Toto."

Elinor tossed her head in outrage, dislodging her eyewear.

Somewhere under the rainbow, Way down deep,

 

Are the specs that were mislaid By a very small, cross sheep.

Trawling Ravelry for patterns using no more than 150m aran weight yarn, I found Alise which looked perfect for my youngest niece's birthday. Magically, the colour changes worked better and I had enough yarn left over to crochet a llttle head scarf.

Contact Dyeing Silk Chiffon with Geranium Leaves and Petals

I had a go at contact dyeing silk last August and didn't achieve anything like the leaf prints I've seen on other blogs. Cutting back a hardy geranium which was going to seed, I remembered seeing dramatic prints from these leaves, on fabric dyed in ecobundles.  Had to be worth another try.

Some ecobundles are described as being simmered in a dye bath, a method I have not tried.  A bag of red geranium petals has been sitting in my freezer all winter. Frozen hollyhock flowers turned out to have lost much of their dye potential, so I hadn't bothered with these.  Still, a geranium petal dye had to be top choice for a test of geranium leaf printing. After a gentle simmer, the petal dye bath went ruby red.

For fabric, I used 1.5m silk chiffon, a very fine gauze which only weighed 25g. Half a teaspoon of alum was dissolved in hot water then topped up with enough warm water for the chiffon to float freely. I left it soaking for 24 hours to cold mordant.

A selection of fresh leaves and flowers from hardy geraniums was laid over half the cloth, then sprinkled with a few fresh red petals from this year's annual trailing geranium basket. The other half of the chiffon was draped back over the top, then folded into three lengthways.

Using a cut off length of plastic drain pipe as the core of the bundle meant I could flatten and press the leaves better than when I tried rolling a scarf around a wooden stick.  The garden string had a few minutes to soak in a jar of vinegar and rusty nails before being bound tightly round the chiffon.  The pipe was stood up inside the dyebath and the pot slowly heated up to 90 degrees Centigrade.

Taking off the lid an hour or so later revealed a blackened lump in a steamy stew.
"The horror! The horror!"  I was appalled.  The bundle had looked so pretty when it went in.
"That'll be the iron from the vinegar on your string.  Saddened the red petal dye alright, didn't it, Beaut?"  Elinor Gotland thinks she knows it all, these days.  She peered into the darkness of the remaining dye bath.  "Looks like the River Zaire on a humid morning."  As I pulled out my ruined ecobundle she positively chortled. "Wouldn't put your hand in there, a crocodile might have you!"
"Thanks for that, Elinor.  Cheers me up no end.  Like you know what colour the River Zaire is, anyway."
"If I don't nobody does.  Bloody nearly fell in it, jumping on to the Ngombe.  That river boat didn't so much stop at Lisala as slow down a bit.  The lower deck was like a floating market, no railings, kids everywhere.  Any Health and Safety Inspector would have forty fits."
"Now, I cannot believe you've been to Africa.  Surely it's far too hot for sheep?"  I may have protested, but I knew I was fated, before the dye began to run, to hear about one of Elinor's inconclusive experiences.

Sure enough, she returned with an old photo album and flicked through the pages.
"Look, here's one of me on the river boat.  After that picture was taken, one of the ladies corn rowed my fleece for me.  Put blue beads in it - I chinked like a wind chime under the fan in the third class bar.  Still sweated buckets, mind.  Half the crew slept on the roof, to get the night breeze.  We were on our way to film 'Apocalypse, In A Minute.' on location."
"Just sounds crazy to me." I snapped.
"A ewe cannot live with her hoof everlastingly on her pulse."  Her lofty look was guaranteed to wind me up.  Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence -- but more generally takes the form of apathy.  Leaving Elinor, the dye pot and my poor blackened ecobundle sitting on the patio, I spent the next couple of days in concentrated silence, trying to spin Polwarth fleece into laceweight yarn.  

When at last I unrolled the ecobundle, I saw a tranquil water way, barred by a black bank of clouds.  

Once the leaves were peeled off the cloth, they had left prints.  Elinor was very taken with the patterned chiffon and fancied it for a party outfit.
"A loose blouse, over a sheer silk tubular dress.  Low heels and amethyst jewellery. Gorgeous or what, Beaut?"
Now we were back on speaking terms, I had to know how the filming of 'Apocalypse, In A Minute' had gone.
"That film went totally tits up, Beaut.  Turned out Curtis, the location manager, had lost the plot. By the time we got there, he'd given people in Kinshasha the idea that he was a filmstar.  They were treating him like an A list celeb. Can't blame them, the closest they'd ever got to a night at the movies was an old cine reel of Charles Aznavour projected on the wall of the Catholic Mission.  He was milking it.  Shall I say, Mr Curtis lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts."

"The swine!"
"Anyway, he hadn't done his job. No hotels had been booked and tempers flared when the crew found the catering trailer hadn't been stocked.  After I heard some of them muttering about mint sauce, I had a mind to go.  Went my own road on my own legs."
"Elinor, you walked all the way home from Zaire!"
"To be honest, Beaut, I'd met some overland travellers in a bar and they gave me a ride in their truck.  In the tropics one must, before everything, drink beer."

The leaf printed chiffon turned out an exuberant and entangled mass of vegetation. After a wash, the black became more of a purple grey.  I am calling it 'Heart of Darkness'.  
Here, Elinor is reprising her role in Apocalypse - savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent.

A Trial of Comfrey Plant Dye on Wool with Alum, Iron and Copper Mordants

Every garden needs a patch of comfrey.  It has big tap roots that suck up nitrogen and potassium locked in the depths of the earth, making its leaves rich in the good stuff that other plants love, but cannot access.  Though it disappears in winter, it is always waist high by the end of spring.  I cut this patch back only a few weeks ago and look at it crowding the place out again.  The first lot of foliage is festering in a lidded bucket, to make tomato food.  As I have also started a fermented suint vat, the tomatoes should be riotously well fed this year, with fleece rinse water to wash down their comfrey juice.  The greenhouse is going to honk.

I am sure I tried dyeing wool with comfrey a couple of years ago, getting a beige that faded.  Jenny Dean's book 'Wild Colour' says it gives sage green.   Last year, dyeing with a 10/1 ratio of bracken shoots gave a beige that kept its colour better than a previous, weaker dye bath.  As I had 1.5kg comfrey leaves, I looked out three 50g skeins of wool.  First to hand came 50g chunky yarn from a Welsh Mountain fleece, mordanted with 10% alum.

Then I rediscovered a bag of 50g skeins of hand spinning which were sold off at a Christmas Craft Fair.  A retired spinner had had a turn out of her old stash.  This wool is evenly spun about double knitting weight and the skeins were already secured with loops, ready for dyeing, though stiff with well aged lanolin.

I gave them all a hot soak with washing up liquid and a few hot rinses, then premordanted three skeins in a pot with a cupful of iron water added - vinegar and water in which rusty nails had been soaking - which turned the wool a pale rusty orange.  The other three were premordanted in copper water - same vinegar and water mix which had had bits of copper piping soaking in it for months.  These turned palest green.

The comfrey leaves were simmered for an hour and left to cool overnight.  Once the bag of leaves was squeezed out, I used them as a mulch for my woad plants.  Even if there is not much goodness left in them, they will help keep the soil damp.  Next day, I simmered one skein with each mordant all together in the brown dye bath. 

The results are greenish - more so than the photo has picked up.  From the left, copper + comfrey next to an undyed copper premordanted skein.  In the middle, iron + comfrey next to an undyed iron premordanted skein and on the right, the alum skeins. Comfrey on alum mordant gave the most herbal green.

"I'd keep that comfrey for your tomatoes, Beaut.  Cut back the mint, that's full of vitamins and minerals too.  You could benefit from some lovely green Creme de Menthe.  Proper tonic. It's kept me going before now."
"Your interest wouldn't have anything to do with the vodka involved, would it?  How long do you think that lovely green would sustain you for these days?"
"Grow the right herbs and you could make Chartreuse.  Best green of all."
"They say the monks had a secret recipe with 130 ingredients. Nice to know you have so much confidence in me, but 130 pots might be more than the patio can take."
"How about absinthe!  Would you have any wormwood wanting pruning?"
"In the tub behind you, Elinor.  Stop sniffing it. You can't start distilling your own absinthe, I need that wormwood to fumigate the dog basket." 
"Awful waste. I've heard it's everso good for you.  Ahh, the smell takes me back to my modelling days in Paris."
"Haute couture catwalk, was it?"
"Artist's model, Beaut.  Poster girl, me."  
"You never were."

This must surely be a wormwood fume hallucination.

Spinning Bond Wool Tops and Dyeing with Woad and Onion Skins

Having spent a century and more breeding their flocks for fleece quality rather than meat, Australia and New Zealand have some enviably smoochy sheep's wool.  Bond must surely be one of the best. In the Fleece and Fibre Sourcebook, it says the breed started as a cross between Lincoln rams and Saxon/Peppin Merino ewes, selected particularly for fineness of fibre. This Bond wool top was an enormous birthday present, brought all the way back from South Australia in my Mum's suitcase.  It is called grey, but descriptions of natural wool colours have baffled me before, like that intermediate brown on a Jacob being called 'lilac'.  This does have a grey halo to it, but to the untutored eye, the wool is even more of a soft brown than the photo suggests.  

Wool tops have been scoured, removing all dirt and grease, then combed, which takes out all the knots, short fibres and debris.  These Bond top fibres are between 12-14cm long with a fine crimp still discernable.  After all my struggles with raw fleece, I appreciate that the attributes of the final yarn depend as much on the method and care taken with preparation as the actual hand spinning.  Stroking my lovely, smooth Bond tops, I luxuriated in the expectation of sitting down to spin instant worsted laceweight.  Too cocky by half.  It is bloody difficult to draft an even stream of aligned fibres straight off the end of wool top.  While I was drafting out the fibre, hoping to feed a thin end through more smoothly, Elinor Gotland admired my birthday gift. 

"I met one of the Bonds on the Comedy Circuit.  Immaculate fleece, real smooth operator."
"Wasn't named James, was he?"
"We used to call him Dapper Jimmy. Haven't heard from him since he went inside last winter."
"Can't he take the cold?  Or was that to keep his fleece nice?"
"It wasn't by choice, Beaut. He was done for tax evasion."

Each metre of tops was parted into four longways, then drafted out til it was several metres long. With one of these looped over my arm, spinning on the 10/1 ratio with minimal tension, I managed to handspin a fine single.  Even so, my two plyed yarn veered between laceweight and double knitting.  One 40g skein had the first dip in my first woad dye bath of the year, another had the second dip.  Not a strong or particularly attractive blue overdye on the grey/brown wool.

Having used up the remainder of the woad vat on some equally unprepossessing beige felt, I was casting around for a way of jazzing that up towards a warmer green.  A conversation on Ravelry reminded me of a stash of red onion skins.

100g red onion skins gave a rich red dye bath after an overnight soak, even before the pot had a long simmer.  The felt came out just as I had hoped, so the two blue-ish Bond skeins went into the afterbath.  Though the dye still looked very strong, not much yellow was going on to the yarn.  An unmordanted washed lock of white wool I put in as a tester showed little change.  Though I had supposed things had to be mordanted again before overdyeing, going back to the books, I read that one mordanting is sufficient for multiple overdyes.The felt had been mordanted before its beige dye bath. This onion dye needed a mordant.

Once I had added 8g dissolved alum  to the simmering dye bath, the two 40g skeins of blue and faint blue yarn soon developed a distinct green with the yellow onion overdye locking to the fibres.  By this point, I was well on my way with knitting the easy bit of a small shawl called Oaklet and bracing myself to tackle the simple lace border.  After having to unpick and reknit the first and third row almost entirely, I was wondering why I ever dreamed I could get the hang of lace knitting. A nice easy stretch followed from row 4 onward and after that, the pattern grew clearly marked.  The remaining rows now made sense and errors were obvious within the repeats, well before I had finished a great long row.  Oaklet really is a good pattern for the beginner and better still, it is free to download.

"Shall I call my shawl 'Onionlet', Elinor?"
"How about 'Shallot'?"
"As in 'Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shallott.'"  I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead and struck a downcast pose.
"You look nothing like a girl about to go chasing off after bold Sir Lancelot."
"Tennyson's allegory goes deeper than that.  The Lady of Shallott embodies the artist abandoning her self imposed exile, sacrificing her creative distance to join in the normal run of life."
"My dags she does.  Shallott was a good girl doing her work at home til she got a glimpse of himself.  Then it was 'Look at the silver bugle on that!'  Silly bint had no idea he was already well in with Guinevere."
"In your version, who plays Lancelot?  Handsome Jimmy Bond, perhaps?"  
Elinor thought this was hilarious.  She dropped ash all over my shawl, rolling round laughing.
"Jimmy Bond!  He's a wether!  About as much machismo as a daytime telly presenter! Nothing more to him than chitchat and who's got the smartest fleece this year.  No, I'd be thinking Black Jack Wensleydale. Unpin this shawl blocking, open the window and I'll show you how it should be done."

The Gotland interpretation.
She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-flower bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She sprayed on plenty of perfume, 'Come up and see me, sometime soon!'
So long as Elinor does not fling my web too wide while looking down to Camelot, Shallott the Shawl will be a birthday present for Mum.

Making a Standing Wool Table Mat out of Felted Woollen Jumpers

M&S make machine washable 100% wool jumpers, but it is possible to felt them. The grey green one in the picture had shrunk from its original 42" chest. The red one had oil stains on the collar, so I put it through a cottons hot wash on purpose. The multicoloured one from a charity shop completed my collection. Another fascinating display at Wonderwool showed a technique called standing wool, used by Rosemary Stowe and Gill Curwen to make rugs and mats. 

Gill's big rugs are fabulous, but I got these jumpers to make a table mat, as practice. Cutting the front panel of each jumper into strips, the edges frayed a little despite the felting and keeping a straight edge is not so easy when clothes have warped over time to fit their wearers. Double width strips can be folded over so the visible edge has no loose ends and accurate cutting is less critical.  Starting with a strip of each fabric folded in half along its length, I rolled them up together like a Chelsea bun, leaving long ends attached, then stitched across the diameter of the circle, going round like a cartwheel, to hold the roll together.

It takes a long needle to push through the width of a single roll, longer still to sew two rolls together.  I used a long darner and linen thread for strength.  Starting off, I was aiming for symmetry and matching rolls in the three combinations.  As the result was uneven looking and increasingly awkward to work with, I switched to making individual rolls with whatever strips came to hand.

These rolls used up the fronts of all three jumpers. They got sewn on to the central piece wherever they fitted, some just as they were, others with the loose lengths wrapped around their outsides.  I thought this would help hold it all together and give the random design a bit of coherence.  The finished mat is fine flat on the table, though it splays apart between the individual rolls if you pick it up by the edge.  Tighter rolling and firmer stitching next time.

Just for once, Elinor Gotland approved.
"Firm and supportive, this, Beaut.  It'd make a lovely yoga mat."
"You do yoga?  Evening classes, is it?"  My incredulity must have shown.
"I'll have you know I was taught by the Mumbai Guruji.  The movie business out there is all chalo, chalo and no time for chai, Memsahib. Us Bollywood actors were glad of a bit of pranayama to fall back on."

Elinor was up unusually early next day.  Coming out with my cup of tea, I found she had taken the mat outside and was in the Hatha Yoga Asana 'Standing Wool'.  I won't say she was only scoring a point, because no-one could balance on one hoof for that long without a lot of practice. I slurped tea noisily, Elinor remained poised.  
I suspect neither of us were that sorry when it came on to rain.
"Oooh, best not let your lovely mat get wet, Beaut!"
Back in the house, I conceded defeat.
"That guru wasn't wasting his time with you! Do tell, what Bollywood films have you been in?"

"You might have heard of 'How Shanti was my Valley'. Made that with Amitabh 'The Man who put the Ram in Ramayana' - total superstar in India.  Still, it was my wet sari scene that got all the publicity.  Film was barely out of production before we started on 'How Green was my Karma.' but I never finished that one."
"Didn't you want to stay?"
"Course I did. Cracking people, lovely food. Problem was one Bombay Mix too many. What with that and the monsoon season, I got struck. Nothing for it but the first plane home. Fly strike can be fatal, you know, Beaut."  Elinor exhaled gustily.  I left her in peace to open her bottom chakra. 

Making a Rug with Blue Texel Sheep Fleece

This is the raw fleece of a Blue Texel sheep.  Although unwashed, it had very little dried grass in it and had been cleared of all matted dirt - in short, no sheep shit. Thanks to this, most of the tail wool is missing, but it was easy to tell the tail end, on the right of the picture, because the locks were so much coarser and full of hairy kemp fibres.

I bought it chiefly for the colours. The blanket, or underside of the fleece, which was close to the sheep's skin when shearing was done, shows the dominant colour of the wool, which is grey.  This photo shows the rolled up fleece. From the photo above, you can see how dark, chocolate black edges shorn from the belly and legs shade through browner greys to reach pale grey along the top of the sheep's back.

The fleece is big, at least 3kg, plenty for a couple of projects.  I pulled off all the coarse locks from the back end, or britch and all the more matted and short staples from round the edges.  Much of it seemed too rough to spin for clothing, so I ended up with a big pillowcase full of skirtings.  Washing raw fleece to remove dirt, lanolin and grease is a science in itself.  Many fine wools felt easily, but I guessed this particular Texel might survive a 40 degree centigrade wool cycle in the washing machine.  

Elinor Gotland was scandalised.  
"Don't play fast and loose with your assets, Beaut.  You won't be told, but they knew how to wash fleece properly where I grew up.  It needs a long soak and no agitation." 
Sheep can sustain a very long,  hard stare.

Well, I admit I have been guilty of banging on her bathroom door.  At least now I understand why she always takes so long getting ready to go out.  After Elinor had read me the riot act, I secured the pillow case with safety pins, put a huge squirt of washing up liquid in the powder compartment and those coarse Texel skirtings came out of the wash beautifully clean and not felted at all.  So there.  

Among the many delights of Wonderwool was a visit to Rag Art Studios.  BG and I got a demonstration of hooking fleece through hessian to make rugs.  I treated myself to a rug hook and a couple of metres of best quality hessian.  Although I had seen the basic technique, I made the rest of this up as I went along.  First, I used a dustbin lid to draw a circle on the hessian and used it as a guide to cutting out an approximate oval.  In my experience, avoiding geometrical accuracy from the very start means you can call a design 'organic' rather than getting fraught when it doesn't come out symmetrical.



I drew on a freehand pattern, leaving a margin of a couple of centimetres.  Folding the edge of the hessian over to the front, I hooked around the edge through the double layer.  This was slow going, although it did hem the hessian.  The fabric will flex easily enough for curves, but I should have left a wider margin as the coarse threads fray easily.  There may well be a better way of getting a strong margin for a rug.

I had sorted the Blue Texel into four broad categories of colour.  The darker locks, being from the belly, had shorter staples, some only 5cm long.  They were much less easy to pull out by hand into some form of continuous roving and needed more twist than the longer grey locks.  Once I had hooked in the outline, I filled in each section. I think I could have left more space between each bump of fleece, as the final rug is very dense.  Although it tried to curl up at the edges, once the whole thing was done, it laid flat, because the curl downwards is counteracted by the weight of the rug on the floor.

Having imagined that the fat bumps of thick roving would fill out a big area pretty quickly, I was surprised how little progress I made each evening.  Still, rug hooking is a satisfying process. This is how I did it.

Working from the back of the rug, put a bit of twist into a short section of roving.  Turning to the front, push the sharp point of the rug hook through one of the holes in the hessian.  As the hook comes out at the back, catch the twisted

roving under it. Pull the hook back through, bringing a loop of roving to the the front. And repeat, repeat, repeat ...



This small rug used almost all the skirted fleece.  It measures roughly 49cm x 56cm and weighs 450g.  Expensive craft, if you paid for beautiful, soft, dyed roving just to make a rug, but a great way of using fibre that would otherwise go on the compost heap.  The name of this one is 'The Chicken Or The Egg?'.  It is now a bathroom mat, very warm under foot and probably machine washable, too.