This week I’ve been dyeing wool yellow, with wind-fallen lichen from the woods & orange with onion skins.
In autumn I collect lichen which has blown from the trees in our woods. It dyes without a mordant to a beautiful lemony yellow. I used to make Dad yellow socks with Blue-faced Leicester wool from the sheep from his land – yellow was his favourite colour.
Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting onion skins for ages. Lots of friends have been saving them for me and I put a sign on the village notice board asking for them – one lady brought me some orange wool instead! So this week I decided to test out the onion skins and got a fantastic orange. It’s variegated rather beautifully, where the mordant (alum) has taken in some places better than others.
Now, the reason for the orange:
These days I buy wool & fleece mostly for my work, and nearly always with a plan in mind. Sometimes I get something because it is simply beautiful, but it isn’t long before a plan forms. But when I first started knitting, I had a tendency to buy wool because it was a Bargain. So, due to a bargain bin in the (now long-gone, I think) Rowan shop in Oxford, I have a very large basketful of oddballs of tweedy-type 4-ply which has been supplemented over time by leftovers of similar types of wool and a Mega-Bargain of an enormous cone of blue wool/silk mix in the same tweedy effect (which has already been broached by Graham’s Mum for a jumper for his Dad, but there’s still oodles left).
What to do with all this has been quietly nagging away for ages. It’s never found its way into any of the charity projects I’ve done. It’s been unsuitable for my work because I don’t use commercial yarns. There was a plan to use it for a long skirt made from hexagons – I found an amazing pattern in Vogue Knitting – but when I knitted up some samples, it simply wasn’t the right wool for the job.
But finally & suddenly – a Decision! We’ll need some more blankets when our barn building work is done and we have spare bedrooms, so that’s what it’s going to be! Meanwhile, the colours are all rather muted, so I dyed some orange & yellow to liven things up. The pattern is from one of the Barbara Walker Treasury books:
It’ll take ages to make the blanket – I’m still finishing off another one and I usually only do blankets as comfort knitting when I’m either ill or too tired to think. But at least there is now finally a Plan!
As well as orange, there’s been Green Great. I’ve finished some bedsocks for Robert using Freyalyn’s dyed wool (the dye name is a Tolkien reference so obscure that even The Bat didn’t know it!)
