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 […]
Finally, the summer holiday is here! I’m going to spend it dyeing (with natural dyes, of course), knitting (with my naturally dyed yarn) and reading (about natural colors, what else??). I just finished reading the Norwegian book “Vaid – En historie om blått” (Woad – A History of Blue) by Anne Sagberg, a well written […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Madder red has been used by humans for millennia. Or, as someone much more eloquent that me put it: “Madder’s diary goes back as far as history’s earliest written pages” (Brian Murphy in “The Root of Wild Madder”). Whenever I dye with madder, and stop to really think about its history, I’m quite fascinated. Yes, […]
Purple! This color has spelled trouble for the natural dyer for centuries, millennia even… Tyrian purple, the famous purple used in antiquity, came from Phoenicia (around present-day Lebanon) where the coastal waters were full of snails of the Murex family, from which the dye (6,6′-dibromoindigo) was extracted. In ancient times, Tyrian purple was an immense […]
I’ve finally completed my prototypes for a child and adult version of the hat that I’ve decided to call Bilskirner. The design changed a bit since the first prototype… My family was not impressed with the rib edge on the first prototype, so my hands were tied. I had to make a garter edge in […]
Norne, our pure wool 1-ply lace yarn, is finally in the shop. I’m so excited! I think this yarn is delightful to knit with. Its texture is just slightly crispy – enough that it’s really easy to knit with (also intricate lace) but not too much, so it isn’t scratchy. Here’s a shawl that I […]
I dyed this gradient a while ago, using madder and tansy, and the plan was initially a Bohus-style hat. But the yarn kept talking to me, and it said that it wanted something with much cleaner lines… So I knit a hat with a very simple pattern of squares on a white background. Simple geometric, […]