We've been on the telly :-)

You may recall that earlier in the year I had a great time being filmed at Armley Mills Industrial Museum by the BBC for a new series, Glorious Gardens from Above. The programme showcased our Growing for Colour project - a community dye plant and edible garden - maintained and nurtured by Hyde Park Source and their group of enthusiastic volunteers and there was a short piece by yours truly showing our heritage dyeing group dyeing knickers (I know) with a selection of plants from the garden.

The series is now airing and our episode is part 4, currently available on BBC iplayer here. It will only be available for 4 weeks though, so don't delay!

If you're a gardening enthusiast you'll no doubt have heard of the show host, Christine Walkden. Her passion for the gardens she visits is amazing and she visits some beautiful gardens during the course of the series - well worth watching! (and no, we didn't get to go in the hot air balloon).

Armley Mills Dyeing Project - Dyeing begins!

A great day yesterday at Armley Mills producing the first samples from the Gott recipe book. We tried 3 different recipes and although we had to do a bit of tweaking of the recipes (distilling sulphuric acid and nitric acid weren't really in the spirit of the session!) we got some great results.

Scaling down the quantities was a challenge - the recipes have little information about the quantity of goods dyed by each recipe so I did some scaling down based more on using small amounts of ingredients and seeing what we could dye! I did calculate the right ratio of ingredients if not an accurate wof:wog (weight of fibre: weight of goods). As a result the colours were certainly in the right ballpark albeit pretty intense and there was plenty left in the baths. I'm sure this wouldn't have been the way dyehouses would have operated as it would have been very wasteful. This leads to questions about whether dyebaths were expected to exhaust after each bath, whether a vat would be used for each shade/range of shades and topped up? If there's a dyehouse dyer in your family history, maybe you could get in touch and let me know?

So, a great start with more excitement to come hopefully!

Summer School 2015 - The Dyer's Recipe Book

Hand-dyed wool samples with synthetic dyes

 I'm absolutely thrilled to announce that I'll be tutoring again at the Association of Guilds of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers Summer School next August (2015) :-)

My course this time will be an in-depth focus on making your own dye recipe book, creating repeatable colours and colour theory using synthetic dyes. There will, of course, be lots of scope for putting your knowledge into practice, trying out some fun dyeing techniques and generally having a great time with colour exploration but if you're keen to get a good grounding in predicting and planning colourways, this will be an ideal course for you!

You'll find lots more info about the venue, prices, course programme and how to book on the Summer School blog here. For information about the Association in general (and some great pics of last Summer School) the main website is here.

And, if you'd like to see some of the photos from my last Summer School courses, there's a tiny taster selection here

If you've never been to a Summer School before it is an amazing experience - a whole week of textile exuberance - expect to see spinning wheels round every corner, knitters in every nook and cranny, weavers beavering away into the wee small hours and wall-to-wall chatter about all things textile-related! Heavenly!

Car boot-y!

Car boot sales are always fun (even if only for those "oh my, we have/had one of those" moments!). But just occasionally they turn up something really interesting. And this was my little gem, picked up in Cheshire.....

What a terrific little haul of old dyes :-) !

Local dyes developed and made in Bolton...

Of particular interest is that these dyes are shown as dyeing both cottons and wools - an early fibre reactive dye perhaps? Must research this further....

Likewise these Fairy Dyes, manufactured in Glasgow, also refer to dyeing both wools and cottons, so clearly it wasn't a one-off. It's amazing that the dye is in tiny little glass test tubes with cork stoppers.

These dyes are possibly older? I haven't heard of this company so will need to do some more digging to find out.

 I'm guessing the jiffy dyes must date to around the 40's judging by this little message on the label...

Isn't it incredible how much we take for granted? And how every little bit of recycling really did count.

Felt-making - Felted Jewellery in Blackpool

I do enjoy my trips to visit the lovely Paula at the Westcliffe Hotel in Blackpool and not just because I get a very nice breakfast on arrival (!). Paula's knitting holidays are always popular and the guests are so warm and friendly - you'd think they'd all been friends for years!

 Felted jewellery was on the menu this time and the group quickly got to grips with making their felted fabrics. We started with felt-in-a-bag (aka minimal-mess felt!) for brooches later on.

Then it was on to felt "sausages" for bracelets and necklaces and beads for bangles.

After a very nice lunch everyone got busy assembling their felt, making some lovely brooches, corsages and jewellery, embellishing with beads and stitching..

 

Fibre East

After last year's welly-clad squelch-fest, this year's Fibre East couldn't have been more different!

The sun was cracking the flags, the new venue was much easier for set-up and it was ice creams all round!

A big thank you to Jan and her team for all their hard work :-)

Belated Woolfest post - better late than never!

This feels like it should be a caption competition! Oh, go on then, another one...

Tsk, now the alpaca feel left out....

But of course there was lots more than lovely animals to be enjoyed at this year's Woolfest. Here are a couple of super pieces that customers brought along that they'd made from our goodies.
A gorgeous hand-dyed, knitted mermaid.

Some felted soaps dyed with Kool Aid

And these are some amazing sample boards made by Kate Horner, the multi-talented owner of Artybird Carnforth, using our Botanical Colors liquid natural dyes.

Beautiful blanks - dyeing at Purl City Yarns

Some super dyeing with my lovely students at one of my favourite venues, Purl City Yarns. Blank canvas dyeing is always fun as students get really creative with their colours and patterns! I can't wait to see the socks knitted from these beauties....

Funky felt!

More fun with the year 10s!

The groups got stuck into felting with some real gusto! The trickiest thing was keeping them supplied with wool!

Lots of lovely felted pictures, names and patterns and even some funky, brightly coloured hair falls (aka woolly dreadlocks)......