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 […]
Madder has several relatives that are also rich in useful reds. These plants are native here in Denmark, and have been used as red dyes a very long time back. Believe it or not, the year is drawing to a close. So, I want to try to summarize all the many dyeing experiments I did […]
Folkvang is a classic tam with a couple of twists Color knitting makes a wonderfully warm fabric, but the yarns that behave the very best in stranded knitting are not very wonderful right against the skin. I think I’ve solved that problem with the design for the Folkvang tam. The first twist is that it […]
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 […]
Among some natural dyers, tansy is seen as quite boring. It’s a common plant, easy to find, easy to dye with, and it contains the so-common yellow – just like so many other plants. But tansy has a long cultural history, and its yellow dye is of high quality! ~ Tansy’s common name is simply […]
One of the great things about natural dyeing is that you can keep overdyeing until you get the color you want. ~ I recently dug out some green skeins of Norne that were not exactly what I had imagined, and had been sitting in the storage basket for a while. I decided to overdye them […]
Madder is one of the most ancient dyes, and one that is described in pretty much any book on natural dyeing. But every book seems to give a slightly different method for obtaining the sought-after madder red. There’s only one thing to do – experiment! Madder was one of the first natural dyestuffs I tried […]
In the summer, when all the plants stand tall, I usually collect good bundles of tansy, yarrow, and other wild dye plants. And they have to go before the next harvest. ~ My dyestuff stores from last year contained big bundles of mugwort and tansy, a smaller amount of yarrow, a box full of dry […]
What’s the collective noun for hats? “Herd”? “Flock”? “Mob”? “Head”? Or, in my case, “parliament”, or even “pandemonium” may even soon be appropriate. I can’t seem to stop knitting them. ~ I’ve been working on two new designs for hats, a lacy one that leapt out at me from a Japanese pattern dictionary, and one […]
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. […]