Friends and flowers
This weekend we went to Bruxelles to visit my sister and her family. One of the highlights of the trip was to meet Anne, a Finnish colleague and knitter with whom I have exchanged a number of amusing e-mails, but whom I'd never met before. Anne brought me a "Strickmühle", and she was kind enough to lend me Elisabeth Lavold's book on i-cords, one of Barbara Walker's book on different stitches and patterns, and a very inspiring book on how to knit a three-dimensional castle with people, horses and a dragon. My knitting wishlist is growing!
Anne wore an amazing cardigan, I only wish I had remembered to take pictures! She had knitted a rolling landscape with fields, hills, trees and skies, and then adtorned it with hundreds of buttons. Apples in the trees, cars on the roads, trains, houses, cows in the fields, children on sleighs, birds in the sky and aeroplanes above them. She even told me she has a UFO button at home, waiting to be added. Wow!
I showed my sister how to dye with Kool-aid, and I am really happy with the outcome. I dyed one skein of a very fine wool (2-trådigt svenskullgarn?), and one skein of a thick thread from Colinette.
For batch number one (thin yarn) I let the wet yarn soak in orange-coloured orange Kool-aid and I microed it until the water was clear. Then I spread it out on a baking sheet and painted streaks of red and pink. I even sprinkled some red powder here and there, and then I cooked it all and let the yarn cool before rinsing it.
For batch number two, I started with a soak made of the remains of the pink powder. Then I drizzled on a very strong mix of the remaining red powder and very little water, and microed everything again. I let the yarn cool, and my sister came up with the idea to make a very tightly wrapped "sausage" of it, before we put it in a last colour bath. We put the tightly wound skein in a bowl of concentrated yellow. Because of the tight wrap, the yarn didn't absorb the yellow evenly, and in some places the pink shone through.
If this yarn had been for sale I would have called it krasse. (After the flower, whose name I don't know in English. In French it's Capucine.) Or what do you think?
Anne wore an amazing cardigan, I only wish I had remembered to take pictures! She had knitted a rolling landscape with fields, hills, trees and skies, and then adtorned it with hundreds of buttons. Apples in the trees, cars on the roads, trains, houses, cows in the fields, children on sleighs, birds in the sky and aeroplanes above them. She even told me she has a UFO button at home, waiting to be added. Wow!
I showed my sister how to dye with Kool-aid, and I am really happy with the outcome. I dyed one skein of a very fine wool (2-trådigt svenskullgarn?), and one skein of a thick thread from Colinette.
For batch number one (thin yarn) I let the wet yarn soak in orange-coloured orange Kool-aid and I microed it until the water was clear. Then I spread it out on a baking sheet and painted streaks of red and pink. I even sprinkled some red powder here and there, and then I cooked it all and let the yarn cool before rinsing it.
For batch number two, I started with a soak made of the remains of the pink powder. Then I drizzled on a very strong mix of the remaining red powder and very little water, and microed everything again. I let the yarn cool, and my sister came up with the idea to make a very tightly wrapped "sausage" of it, before we put it in a last colour bath. We put the tightly wound skein in a bowl of concentrated yellow. Because of the tight wrap, the yarn didn't absorb the yellow evenly, and in some places the pink shone through.
If this yarn had been for sale I would have called it krasse. (After the flower, whose name I don't know in English. In French it's Capucine.) Or what do you think?
2 Comments:
Blomnamnet du söker är nog "garden cress", använd Lexin på KTH, den brukar fungera ganska bra!
http://lexikon.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/swe-eng
Garnet ser jättefint ut, cool-aid verkar coolt tycker jag. Kanske provar det någon gång.
Grattis till vinten också, trots att jag tycker att "sticka" aldrig kommer klinga lika vackert och spännande som "to knit", liksom garn aldrig kommer att bli ett lika vackert ord som Yarn. :-)
By iHanna, at 7:00 PM
Hi! Where should I start? Yes, it was a real pleasure to meet you and some of your clan. Any experimenting done with the knitting mill yet?
I'm expecting to receive some real woolly wool in October, so let my Kool-Aid adventures begin then - thanks for them as well! The connection between the flower and your dyed yarn is wonderful, Capucines it is. But I think that the English use the word "Nasturtium" - unless they want to show off their Latin skills and talk about Tropaeolum species. I bought some pink ones for this year. Too bad that the best flowering season was over before I bought myself a digital camera. Beware! The cardigan photos might show up, too.
Anne
By Anonymous, at 10:11 AM
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