Tag: cochineal

COCHINEAL of the CANARIES

Cocheneal is truly an amazing insect, with its huge content of red dye. Along with madder, indigo, and yellow from local plants, it allows the natural dyer to dye all the colors of the rainbow. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in present-day Mexico in 1519, they were on a treasure hunt – for gold and […]

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TURNED HEMS

“Homemade” or “handmade”? With knitting, it’s all in the details. Here, I’ll show how I finish a turned hem invisibly. ~ A while ago, I put up some pictures of this little stripy dress (still no pattern out, but it will eventually come!) But I’m also working on a matching cardigan for boys. Both have […]

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LILLE BOLD

I’ve knit a handful of small balls from leftover Fenris wool, and I have to say my family has never shown more interest in my knitting! “What are you making?”, “Can I have one?” I’ve just finished knitting a new version of my Vindauga Baby Blanket, which is much easier to knit than the original […]

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Easy Knitting

Last week, I brought my yarn and kits to a market, and took the chance to chat with lots of people. ~ Lots of people stopped by, some drifted by on their round of the entire market, others stopped to chat. There were two things that most people told me. The first one: they really […]

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Knitting Better Stripes

Knitting stripes is so addictive. Here’s a simple technique to make the color change from one stripe to the next smoother when knitting in the round ~ I’m working on the design for a girl’s dress in multicolor stripes. It has a turned picot edge and it’s knit top-down. The first prototype is knit in […]

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Vindauga Baby

The design theme from my Vindauga Blanket just stayed in my brain after I knit the first one, demanding to be knit in more variations! And when that design theme met with my experiments in 2-dimensional gradients (or matrices), the result was the Vindauga Baby Blanket, which I’ve finally managed to publish the pattern for. […]

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Summer Rain

This summer passed in a big cloud of rain, which has been lovely for plants and mushrooms that came out early and in huge numbers. We went on lots of day trips, for example Skovsnogen Artspace: My mom has managed to finish a couple of knitting projects with yarn that I’ve dyed. An Elizabeth shawl […]

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Saxon Blue

Ever since I first read about Saxon blue, produced by reaction indigo with concentrated sulfuric acid, I’ve really wanted to try it. The lawyer Johann Christian Barth is credited with inventing the Saxon blue reaction in 1743. He treated natural indigo with sulfuric acid, then known as “oil of vitriol”. According to de Keijzer, the […]

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Finishing and Beginning Anew

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 […]

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The Quest for Light-Fast Purple, Part Two

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 […]

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