I had 3 shades of blue, 2 of which I'm pretty sure were dyed in an indigo vat and were probably leftover rovings that I tossed in to use up excess dye. There was some pale yellow, a rusty orange and a rusty red, some pinks, and purples, some green mohair locks which later became green roving when I realised I was sitting on it and some icicle nylon sparkly stuff.
I filled this basket full and forget to take a photo of the basket full of rolags. It was quite impressive and very pretty. It takes a lot longer than you'd think to fill a basket with blending board rolags. I started just after lunch, took a 20 minute tea break to stretch, and then when I started running out of blue rovings, I realised it was 5 pm and time to start dinner.Odette's Obsessions
Natural Dyeing, Spinning, Weaving, Other Fibre Arts, Gardening, Cooking, Costuming, and...
March 30, 2025
What I did this weekend.....
March 24, 2025
An early spring hike
It snowed again. I woke up to low, lead grey, snow clouds and a wintery sky. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground. It doesn't feel like spring today! Yesterday was another cool day, however we had a short reprieve from the incessant wind. We took advantage of that and went for a hike. The trails were in pretty decent shape all things considered, with only a few muddy and slippery spots. That made it a rather nice day out. I was worried I was over dressed, with my parka and a hoody on underneath, instead of the liner jacket, my double wool toque and thick wool mittens. However, it was cool enough outside, just above freezing that I was comfortable the whole trail! It wasn't sunny, although the forecast suggested we should get some sun. It was however, brightish out, which was nice enough. The dark, foreboding skies we've had most of the winter do get a little bit much sometimes. The river was flowing fairly quickly. With all the snow melting over a few days and some rain in there, and now more snow, I was amazed that it wasn't higher than it actually was. It's usually this brown, silty looking water. The difference with the view in the springtime is that you can easily see the water. Once it warms up a bit, the foliage from the trees and the ground plants will obscure the view because they are so lush and full.
March 19, 2025
While many of the birds which visit us during the winter have gone back to wherever they spend the good weather, our bluejays, mourning doves, cardinals are still with us. The grackles are at a reasonable level this year, but I think only because I missed filling the feeders the day they returned. We have red winged blackbirds who only eat at the feeders until there is other food available. There were a couple of cowbirds, some finches or sparrows and the woodpeckers, who don't care if I'm on the deck or not.
I also spent time watching the trees. We've missed maple syrup season all together this year because of the odd spring weather. The maple trees are starting to flower, so syrup season is pretty much over. We've got a few bottles set aside for a situation like this, so we won't do without.
The snow seems to have finally melted. Yesterday there was still some snow at the edges of the fields around us. The frost is gone and moisture is draining aways. It was bad there for a while as there was no place for the snow melt to go and we had water over good parts of the land around the house. That was a pain to deal with for sure. Not just puddles, but massive puddles flooding the barn and making for muddy, squidgy, slippery walking. It wasn't bad outside today!
I took a break from making the little comfort dolls. I dug up a skein of bamboo/wool blend sock yarn.
It's a tad heavier than some yarns, but not by much. I can make 2 pair of shorty socks with them as long as only one pair has heel tabs and the other just has a cuff. I love the colours of these. In discussions with a friend, apparently some people don't like the cuffs to show. I really don't care as comfort is more important to me. I'm still undecided on the tabs vs the little cuff. Last summer I don't think I noticed a difference between the two.I made these on my Circular Sock Machine, a Legare 400, which is over 100 years old. While I'd love a new machine, maybe a NZAK - New Zealand Auto Knitter, I don't have the $ saved up right now. However, my old girl, while sometimes being a little fussy, still works a treat.
I've been doing a lot of spinning lately. Having a group of gals who meet once a month to spin together has really helped get the spinning mojo boing again. While I've been spinning off and on since my Master Spinner program, I've been mainly spinning cotton and other oddly technique specific fibres. Getting back to spinning real wool took a bit of time to reconnect with my skills.March 09, 2025
Hints of spring
The ground is still frozen though, so the melting snow is running off into the lowest areas. Luckily we have some drainage in the farm land around here which helps those areas. It hasn't been warm enough for the frozen water in the ditches to melt though, so the snow melt is running over the frozen ground, making for a very muddy top inch of soil and grass. It won't last though, because a few more mild days are forecast which should help a lot. Right now though, much of this water is running right into the barn, making parts of it a frozen mess.
I've made some more of the comfort dolls. A friend and I took a field trip to a yarn store in a nearby town, which was highly discounting sock yarn. It was $.97 a 100 g skein! There were limited colours available but I still purchased a good few skeins. What there weren't though were solid colours. My friend dug down and found some of this pink, which she passed one skein on to me to make more comfort dolls. I thought it might be good skin tone, but it's very pink. Instead I managed to make a pig girl. I didn't have a crochet hook small enough, so making the hair was not fun at all. Still, I'm hoping someone will love her.
I've almost finished spinning up the cashmere merino singles. There is only a handful of roving left, but my bobbins were full. Not having access to the deck and table where I usually do my dyeing, I tried a different technique in a roasting pan. It was not a huge success. I managed to label my black dye as brown. I wanted brown. I also should have diluted the dye a lot more.I soaked the yarn for several hours. I chose not to add vinegar to acidify the water, which I would do next time. I lay the skeins in a roasting pan, and squirted and dabbed dye on the yarn, in what should have been short runs of colour. I then added the vinegar and water to do a low water dye on what I hoped to be similar to a painted skein.
Nope, the dye ran, and the black which should have been brown, dyed all the white spaces I left. Because I didn't dilute the dye enough, it's much darker than I'd anticipated or hoped for.
Look at the lovely blue sky though! And the snow is melting. You can see the grass in spots! I don't feel bad about the dye experiment because there are hints of spring today and it is glorious!
February 25, 2025
Winterlude ...
A break in the storm systems and a few moments of sunshine. We've had so much wind thought that it still felt like it was snowing.
This is our pond, although it took a few minutes for me to identify the photo under all that snow.
We've had a couple of days of mild weather though, so we've had some melting and the snow has compacted a bit. This means the gigantic snow bank that the snowplow made, is no longer blocking the view of oncoming traffic, which is nice. After a couple of fairly mild winters with minimal snow, this winter has been a bit of a surprise. The longer days are nice though. Sunset isn't until about 6:30 pm, and I don't have to put my car lights on when I leave the house at 7:45 am, so yay for that! It gives hope that spring is on its way. I do believe though that the local prognosticating rodent, Willie, a groundhog from the Bruce Peninsula, is laughing away in his burrow, with his call for an early spring. We're still waiting for suitable weather changes to tap our maple trees.
February 17, 2025
A stormy week of projects
We've had 3 major snow storms in the past week. While I know other areas of the province have loads more snow, we've had more snow than we've had in years. We've had so much wind this year, which keeps the Great Lakes from freezing. This in turn causes lake effect snow, on top of whatever system works its way up or across to us. Then with the wind, even when we don't have snow, we get blowing snow, like today with blowing snow warnings because it's affecting roads and visibility. I'm really looking forward to spring and getting back to some sort of routine that includes something other than staying home because hubby took my car to work since it's better on the icky roads.
But while stuck at home, I've started spinning the merino/cashmere/silk rovings. It's easier to spin the rovings processed and dizzed off the drum card thicker than the commercially processed rovings which are much easier to spin very thin.It' been interesting because I'd been spinning cotton for demos and to finish up my stash for ages now, and have had to rethink my spinning technique to slow down and be more mindful of not over-spinning the wool blends and wools. I have one bobbin full and started on the second one. I plied a sample, and didn't like the results. I think instead I'll spin it all as singles. I'll dye it as singles and then weave a scarf with it. Otherwise I'll end up making mittens and it's almost spring and unless I manage to lose all 3 pairs that I still haven't lost yet, I won't need another pair of mittens this year, no matter how soft and yummy they'd be.
I've been busy using up some scrap sock and fingering weight yarn on the CSM. There is a springcrank-in which gathers up requested items for donations. Last year it was comfort dolls that went to the Provincial Police to give out to children in trauma situations. The group donated 80 of them and they had given almost all of them out during the next 6 months and have asked for more. So I started making a couple for my donation. I'm running out of sock yarn scraps though. I thought I had more, because I'd saved up a bunch from many of the years when I'd knit socks by hand, but having used a lot last year, there aren't many left. I'll make what I can even if it's not as many as last year.
Last year I had a skein of generic browny fleshtone which worked well for people dolls of no specific race. This year, I've not found any skin tones, and only had a bit of leftover greys. I've used the greys to make a couple of bears or cats, because I can't tell what they actually are. I had a couple of leftovers in a bit larger amount so have made some very colourful bunnies. They seem to work better in crazy colours than the bear/cats.
I made a bear snake today which had 3 bears in it. It's called a snake because it's a long tube of projects. You can make sock snakes too, which are socks knit one after another and not separated until you are finishing them. There are 3 bear project in between a double section of waster yarn, with a ravel cord in between each bear, so it's waste yarn, ravel cord, waste yarn, bear legs, shirt, head, waste yarn ravel cord - and so on.. It means you only have to set up the CSM once for multiple projects.That is the last of the grey in my stash, which I'd been using for fur colours. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. There is no cheap yarn locally, and what yarn there is, if it's remotely affordable for charity work, it's in vivid, bright colour mixtures, which I don't think I can turn into bears.
Please note- that ginormous bag of stuffing I bought last year, is almost empty. There is a good chance I'll need to buy more! Yikes!
February 16, 2025
Spinning the last of my Cotton
I've been spinning up the last of the coloured cotton that I'd picked up out in Alberta, when I was doing my master spinner course. I really only had odds and ends left, rather than some of the larger packets. I'm a bit sad because this was lovely to spin. I had enough of the green to divide the roving in two and spin up about 3/4 of a bobbin of plied cotton yarn. I forgot to take a before photo, but it was a beige colour raw. Once it was plied I soaked it in water for a few minutes and then brought the water to a boil. This brings out the colour of the coloured cotton. It's a tad darker than this but I didn't want to play around with colour processing because I took the photo too close to a large window with indirect light bouncing off a lot of snow!
The second skein was really spun with whatever leftovers I had in a willy nilly fashion. I just grabbed whatever bit I got when I reached for it and spun. It's a mix of white, green and brown. It also shows why maybe heat setting colour of white cotton isn't a good idea. White cotton when boiled can turn beige! It's definitely an odd looking skein of yarn, but at least there was minimal waste. I have less than a metre left on the 2nd bobbin of singles! Yay me!
Cotton Clouds cotton roving is a dream to work with and comes in several hard to find and interesting colours. Not available around here sadly.