Category: Dyeing

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Thank you Fibre East!

We had a lovely weekend at Fibre East – many thanks to the organisers for putting on such a great show and to everyone who came to see us! Friday was absolutely boiling hot which made for a ‘melty’ few hours getting our stand setup. Fortunately the weather was a lot cooler on Saturday and Sunday….and there was rain too but we stayed dry.

It’s always lovely chatting to everyone (ok, I might have done too much chatting – I didn’t have much of a voice left by Sunday afternoon!) and catching up with friends. I managed to have a wander round on Sunday to look at all the other stalls.

Our next show is the Southern Wool Show on September 1st at Newbury racecourse, 10am – 4pm. We will be bringing our self striping yarns, some of our other yarns and some fibre too. We will also have some Needle Snugs (anyone who uses fixed circular needles needs some of these!) and a supply of Eucalan wool wash. This is a new show, run by the same team who run ‘Spring into Wool‘ in Leeds. We are really looking forward to it – there will be 60 stalls, food, workshops and demos and there is plenty of free parking. It’s about time we had a wool show in this part of the Country! We have got 2 tickets for the show to give away – head over to our Facebook page or follow us on Instagram to find out how to enter our free draw to be in with a chance to win.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Working on our hand dyed yarns…

We have been doing some more dyeing – starting to build up our stash stock (did I say stash?!) so that we can get our shop open, hopefully later this month. I thought I’d share a few photos from this week’s session 🙂

Andrew is mostly in charge of mixing and measuring. We’ve been trying out some new colour combos as well as re-creating some of our previous recipes. I will photograph the new ones when they have dried and share them here. Andrew knit up this fab pair of socks from one of our hand dyed yarns 🙂

I love these colours together! I recently went on a one day brioche knitting workshop with Kate Atherley and I’ve started making a shawl with the same yarn, with a semi-solid grey as the 2nd colour (photos soon!)

These will be making an appearance in our shop soon. A friend is currently knitting me a sample in the middle colour 🙂

If you want to find out when our shop is open for business, please sign up for our newsletter.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Colour inspiration…

The sun came out yesterday so we decided to make the most of it and went for a long dog walk in the afternoon. Since getting rid of all my stupidly heavy Nikon kit last year and replacing it with the beautifully lightweight (in comparison!) Olympus OMD EM-1,  I’m trying to get back into the habit of taking my camera along with me.

There wasn’t a lot of colour to be found – although there are plenty of daffodils coming through now so I don’t think it will be too long before they start blooming! It was a bit muddy in places and Pippin went straight in the bath when we got home (much to his disgust! He tolerates being bathed but he’s not keen).

I love all the different colours in this rooftop! They would make a nice sock yarn colourway!

We saw some deer but they were too far away for me to get a decent photograph. I really like the lines made by the new shoots here.

Everything’s looking a bit brown at the moment!

Plenty of green stuff about 😉

A big box of undyed yarn arrived a few days ago so I’m making plans for some dyeing later this week and we will be making a start on building up stock for our online shop opening 🙂 That’s if Andrew doesn’t keep claiming it to feed his sock-knitting habit!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Hello 2017…

January 5th already – eeek! Everyone seems to be busy setting goals and making plans for the year. I’m working on a few plans of my own – the first involves crochet and making videos. You’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out more but here’s a cute photo in the meantime 😉


Andrew & I had fun with some yarn dyeing before Christmas and we have plans to do lots more this year. I still can’t decide what to make with this skein – it will probably be socks.

Last year I successfully completed both of Joeli’s tech editing courses and started taking on a few clients. I’m looking forward to doing a lot more tech editing this year. I have plenty of availability at the moment (I edit both knitting and crochet patterns). You can find out more on my tech editing page.

One of my goals for this year is to do more designing. I have recently submitted a design to a magazine (waiting to hear the outcome) and I’ve got a couple of things which should be ready to publish in the next month or so. I’ve got lots of ideas – I just wish I could knit faster (or in my sleep maybe?!) I’m quicker at crochet so maybe I should work on my crochet designs first!

I’m also hoping to run a few workshops later in the year. I think I’ve found a suitable venue 🙂 I just need to decide on some dates and which workshop(s) to run. Knitting toe-up socks is likely to be high on the list.

If you want to stay in touch, please sign up for my newsletter. I promise not to send you an email every day – or even every week! I might send you something once a month or so – when I have news to share 🙂

Posted on by — Leave a comment

More dyeing experiments…

We’ve been doing a bit more dyeing – testing out the dyes at different concentrations (all in a very scientific manner, thanks to Andrew and his spreadsheet!) We ended up with a nice rainbow of colours. My friend saw them and wanted some to knit a set of mini advent stockings – seemed like a nice idea so we dyed up another rainbow and we are now both knitting stockings! I wrote up a pattern which takes a bit less than 5g of yarn & will make it available once I’ve tested it properly. I’m a bit behind with mine as I’ve only knit 5 so far but I’m hoping to get them finished in time to use this year!

I also had a go at dyeing a semi-solid – really like how this one turned out and it is probably destined to become socks:

My last experiment was a variegated yarn. I thought I’d messed these two up because it was looking a bit messy in the pot but I’m really happy with how they turned out. Both dyed at the same time – one is slightly pinker than the other. Looking forward to seeing what they are like knitted up:

I’m hoping we can have another dyeing session soon – I’ve got some merino/tencel lace weight which I want to have a play with and we still have quite a bit of sock yarn to experiment on too 🙂