Watercolour robin

I felt like a bit of watercolour, so I dusted the paintbox and copied a photo from a Christmas card, for my mother's birthday. I thought the picture looked very smart mounted on some dark green tissue paper and then put onto some white card. I think it would have looked even smarter with deckled edges and I see from my time wasting on the internet surfing activities that a special jagged-edged ruler device is on sale that you can tear your paper along and it will produce a pseudo-deckled edge. I expect it will take some practice to use and I shall no doubt tear some of my masterpieces in half in the process, but I might well buy myself one.

Hand dyed silk samples

Silk samples following instructions in the Ashford Book of Dyeing, by Ann Milner

Here are the 1g silk samples (five times round the warping mill, as my scales aren't that accurate) I dyed with procion MX from Kemtex. Unfortunately they seem dominated by purple, and that may have been my mistake. The first twenty samples I dyed I'd put the silk in the pot first and only then added the blue dye, then ages later the red dye, and then even more ages later, the yellow. So maybe the blue got to be more dominant, having had first dibs at the silk. Anyway, for the other forty-six samples I got all the dye in first and then added the silk.

There are plenty of mistakes to be made when doing percentage dyeing (I did 2% here, a dark shade), and I made sure I made as many as I could.

A visit to Liverpool, Formby beach with the iron men

Just in case you thought I did nothing but sit about weaving all day, here are two photos of a visit to Liverpool in October to visit Kodakina.

Rug number four

So


Here are the photos of my fourth rug. I did not have enough of any one colour to create the "windows" effect that had caught my attention in Peter Collingwood's book but I am still delighted with this bit of weaving. I had to incorporate some randomly sized and coloured stripes to ease the problem of quantity of the main colour, but I am happy with this addition to the design. Yippee.

Delighted as I certainly am, I have had enough of rug weaving for the present and am weaving some woollen scarves, which I shall show you presently.

Dyeing experiment

Perhaps you would like to see some pictures of my second experiment in dyeing - these are 1g samples of silk noil in 66 beakers, changing colour in three directions, each with different proportions of red, blue and green (from Ann Milner's book again)

I am still waiting for them to dry so I can put them on a piece of card and then maybe I shall choose some colours to dye my scarf warp and weft that I've got prepared.