I know I've been very neglectful of my blog. It can't be denied that when I get onto something (like selling felted bags), everything else falls by the wayside.

Here's some dying I did last weekend, on a very neutral light coloured wool:


These are chubby hanks that are around 7-8 ounces each. The first one was done with Dylon Cold A3 Lilac. I found it at our local fabric store. I love the colour, it's perfect. I got very consistent results. I just don't fancy the idea of using chemical dyes, yet I can't deny the results are the best.

The second skein was an overdye job done on some cornflower blue wool that I wasn't in love with. I used Kool-Aid in Strawberry, with some grape thrown in towards the end. Not totally consistent results, but I'm sure it'll knit up fine. A little too rosey for my taste, but that just proves how strong Kool-Aid is!

The third skein was again the neutral wool, this time dyed with Wilton icing colour in Violet. Man you don't need much of this stuff! I used WAY too much and it wasn't even half a teaspoon. There was tons of colour left in the pot. Next time I'll use much much much less. I see the potential for a very nice muted violet. I wasn't going for ultra violet! But it's very pretty.

The orange below used to be orange from Kool-Aid, but it was too soda pop orange. I overdyed it with turmeric (an Indian spice, also called 'Indian Saffron), and threw in a bit of the neutral wool and boy what a yellow! The orange is still too orangey, it'll become part of my wool embroidery stash.


Dying is fun!!

I'm so excited, I just purchased this walnut yarn swift online from Knitting Notions. Jon (hubby) is buying it for me for our 18th wedding anniversary. It looks like a piece of fine furniture. It is finished with "a blend of tung oil and linseed oil, followed by a topcoat of beeswax". It'll be such a relief to give my shoulders a break from unwinding a skein from around the back of 2 chairs. Now all I need is a ball winder!

A bag with a destiny

I had a bag listed at my etsy shop that had at least 570 views and yet it sat unpurchased for a month. I had come to the conclusion that it must be awaiting a special destiny. On Saturday I had a woman in Helsinki, Finland ask if I shipped internationally. I had never shipped overseas but I offered to look into it right away. Later that day I was mailing off my little green bag to Finland! I was so pumped because it made me happy to see it go to a place where the Scandinavian culture embraces colour. It feels like it's going to where it belongs.


The buyer said that she wouldn't be my last overseas buyer, which was such a sweet thing to say. Can't deny this is all very fulfilling!

I finally tracked down a way to work around my problem of logging into my Blogger account! Phew! Anyways, just a hit-and-run post of a recent bag I made:



Let me just say that weaving in the ends for each row of colour took about as long as knitting the whole bag! Not really, but it felt like it. ;-)

That's a seed/moss stitch strap, I think about 5 stitches wide. One thing I learned about doing a strap like this (the hard way!!), is that a seed stitch strap will grow in length, not shrink. Pre-felting the strap was 19" long. Post-felting it was 23". Something to keep in mind!