Hashtags

I keep seeing the hashtag 'yarnporn' everywhere and wonder if I'm the only person who finds it a bit creepy, like people are supposed to be literally getting off on gorgeous yarn like those people who are in love with and have relationships with inanimate objects? I know I'm definitely reading too much into it, it just sounds so gross to me, like it could be a specialist section on an actual porn site. Sad, stuck-up old me, I use the hashtag 'lovelyyarn'!

Feeling much better about painting in general, the commissions are finished and it's time to move on to getting some pieces done for a lovely lady in Australia. Fun!

Here are my greeny-blue skeins, much more greeny-blue-deep plum than pictured. Can't wait to see how they knit up (these are my own hand dyeing efforts).

 And on to the expert dyeing... This is a Rose City Rollers sock I'm knitting in Hedgehog Fibres sock (24 Carat colourway), I have never knit with anything so soft before in my life, it is absolutely amazing, not to mention the wonderful brown/gold of the yarn (it's got quite a 1970s sort of vibe to it).
This sock should be quick to knit, technically I should have finished the pair already, but I've lost one of my wooden dpns and am using a smaller metal one in its place (yuck) and I'm also feeling quite focused on my colourwork cardigan, more of which I will share on Wednesday.

A skein or two

So, to begin with, here's a beauty I was lucky enough to win in a competition. It's from the wonderful Life in the Long Grass yarn company and is a ridiculously gorgeous little skein. Ha ha, Rich came home from work and I showed him my green skein (see below) and then he caught sight of the LITLG one and was amazed by it (thinking I'd dyed it!), ha ha... Erm, no, that one was done by a professional!

But I'm very, very pleased with my skeins, the yarn I used is very soft and squashy, like a little cushion (BFL + nylon sock yarn). I will probably make a couple of changes when I do the next batch, little things like tying the yarn up myself, it was a little loose and I do like a neat skein.
This will be an excellent and fun way to amuse myself creatively during the day as it's something I can easily do while the kids are around. It's interesting because although I've only been doing it a few days and have only done a couple of batches, it's already feeding back into the studio and helping me with my painting in the evenings (I've been at rock bottom with my painting mojo over the last few weeks).

Doing dyeing

So all the hand-dyeing stuff arrived yesterday. I was excited to get started but was also pretty nervous, what if everything I dyed was horrible!?

Anyway, I cracked right on and I did it! It was so much fun. Mixing up the dyes was a little bit like mixing oils from dry pigments but not as easy because I had no idea what the final colour would be like, it was sort of like watercolours in a way but again, not as easy. Lots of fun though, did I mention that?.
I did two types of dyeing, the hand-painted sort and the traditional dye bath sort. I liked both but found hand-painting quite tricky, the sections I wanted to be lighter came out lighter in a 'the dye hasn't been applied properly' sort of way but I'll see how it knits up.

 I had to have a massive clean-up before I started anything... Our kitchen gets pretty chaotic on a daily basis.

Can you see the squishy soft yarn in the above photo? Hedgehog Fibres again (another impulse buy)! It's their Kidslik Lace and ooh, it's so lovely, I'm so glad I snagged two skeins. I'm planning on knitting a gorgeous summer cardigan with it, double-stranded,one strand Kidsilk, one strand sock weight. The cardigan is called Celastrina, it's light, floaty and empire-line (my favourite style).

The pink! The rust! The mossy tones... Just perfection. Will be back with my imperfect little skeins in the next few days, oh, and a couple of small stash enhancements too.

Thoughts about hand dyeing yarn

I've recently (impulsively) decided to give hand dyeing wool a go here at home. I've been feeling increasinly disillusioned with the art world, under pressure to produce things for people (lovely people, lovely things), taken advantage of by too many art galleries & dealers, and I just want a little change, to combine two things I genuinely love, yarn and painting.
The knitting community is very different to the arty ones, it is very supportive, friendly and relaxed. For example, lovely knitters adding me as a friend on my new Instagram account, even though I only have two posts and not a lot else, simply because I've added them. Now, I know this makes good business sense, and some are dyers but it's still friendly and welcoming and appreciated. I'm not sitting here behind the laptop crying because nobody loves me or appreciates my art by the way (lots of kind people say kind things), I simply want to get more into my yarny pursuits & see if my painterly ways would translate to skeins because I am literally obsessed with skeins of yarn at the moment. Obsessed in the sense that I lie awake at night matching skeins to patterns and wishing I had more hours to do more knitting and also lying there smiling about the colours in a skein. With Hedgehog Fibres for example, I see the colours in Beata's yarns everywhere, particularly in the skies over the moor (where I live). I love to think about yarns while I'm walking although I'm not sure it's normal to be quite so obsessed with yarn. But then I think about Birthday Cake!!! I have enough Birthday Cake for a third Oblique cardigan, took me ages to decide which cardigan to knit with it because variegated yarn sometimes needs texture & lace to allow it to really shine. Oblique has it all and I can't wait to get started. But then there was a post on the Hedgehog Fibres destash page on Ravelry, of their Merino DK in the Monarch colourway (previous post, last photo), 7 skeins, enough for a good sized cardigan and destined to become White Pine by Amy Christoffers. Leftovers from the two colourways are going to become a thick pair of socks.

Anyway, coming back to hand dyeing here at home, me on my own, who knows, it could be a massive disaster & totally not work for me. We'll see, I'll keep an open mind and an open heart as they say!
One thing I worry about (and do so with my paintings too) is that I might unconsciously emulate somebody else's style. If that happens and is blatantly obvious, embarrassingly so, then it may be time to go back to the drawing board, leave it to the experts so to speak. Fingers crossed I can make it work and make something that is me and not a mish mash of my memories of everyone else's amazing yarn.