Today, I’ve sown some of my dye plant seeds in small pots indoors. The night frost has almost gone, you see… Last year, I had luck growing Japanese indigo and woad from seeds that I cultivated indoors before planting outside, so I’ll do the same again with Japanese indigo this year. I’m skipping woad because […]
MIDGAARDS HAVE
I’ve recently completed lots of projects, and begun even more new ones. Spring energy, maybe? Over Easter, I had to study for an exam. I do find it theoretically interesting that you can describe populations of animal and plants mathematically (that’s population ecology) but ultimately, I do prefer to move about freely outdoors and collect […]
The weather here in Denmark has been all that bad in March. I suppose you’re supposed to make some comment along the lines of “in like a lion, out like a lamb”, but really, good and bad weather just depends on expectations. I’ve been sitting outside in the sun a couple of times already, knitting. […]
I designed a simple, color knit hat for children and adults, Bilskirner, a while ago. Now, I’ve finally completed the pattern with matching children’s mittens and adults’ mitts, and the pattern is up in my Ravelry store. The mittens will fit a 3-4 year-old. The thumb is knit from live stitches from knitting stitches on […]
Green is a difficult color to achieve with natural dyes. One might initially think that it was easy, given that green is the predominant color in nature. That’s not the case, since the green color of plants comes from chlorophyll, which doesn’t work as a natural dye (since it’s soluble in fat, not in water). […]
A while ago, I wrote about the millennia-long quest for purple, a serious business in antiquity. Since my pocket money won’t afford me any quantity of murex purple, I decided to do a series of reds from madder and cochineal and overdye them with indigo blue. I used 10 g test skeins of my Fenris […]
Dyer’s polypore is one of the very good dye mushrooms found here in Denmark (and many other places, including the rest of Europe and North America). It grows on dead wood, or parasitically on the roots of living trees. It grows in the same spot year after year, and grows a new fruiting body every […]
2015 is history, and it’s now 2016, but I think there’s just time to show you my mushroom dyeing of 2015, which brought a quite nice mushroom harvest. Fall is my favorite time of year. Always has been. It’s the colors, the scents, and the long forest walks. We go to the same plantation in […]
My big blanket made of test skeins is done – I’m so happy with the way it turned out!! Here is the entire blanket. I know you can’t tell from such a photo, but it’s quite large, 96 x 150 cm (38 x 59 inches). And a couple of closer views. I took lots […]
Quite a while ago, I knit this little pincushion, the physical evidence of my experiments with an organic indigo vat. It’s knit in Fenris 100% wool, 450 m/100 g. The pattern is free, Peerie Pin Cushion by Ellen Kapusniak. You’re supposed to sew it together, but I, of course, grafted it closed. I normally use […]