Wool and silk scarf eco prints

My scientific training and my love of discovery mean I'm always experimenting. These scarves are 73% silk and 27% wool. The wool component means the images are sharper and the colours tend to be more intense. The scarves are a generous size, 60" by 11".  Soft and snug, wearing one of these is sheer pleasure.

If you are interested in any of these please contact me at lee.bisset @ ihug .co .nz. You'll need to remove the spaces.

There is a view of the entire mauve and green scarf on the previous post. 

Finally beautiful printed scarves

After 5 months of experimenting, I was confident enough to purchase some silk scarves and begin eco printing them with the idea of selling my work. Since I showed them at Thames Creative Fibre last week and uploaded some to my Felt shop they have been selling like hot cakes.
Using only pigments found naturally in the plants, the printed scarves have fine details and mostly delicate colours. I plan to make more soon that give pinks and purples.  What I like the most are the surprises when a new colour emerges from a leaf or petal and the gentle impact of this craft on my environment. Leaves return to the earth via the compost, mordants are simple like rusty nails and seawater. I use steam to extract the pigments and I gather the plants on walks or sometimes I spot them on road verges or in friend's gardens. I've even knocked on doors and asked if I could gather samples. No one has ever said "No". I've used metres of silk testing plants and always there are surprises.
These have all sold but I will put more photos in more recent blogs.

Silk eco print experiments

After eco printing paper I was keen to start printing on silk. I bought India Flint's books Eco Colour and Second Skin and was stunned by he possibilities. I didn't know where to start. I tried printing using frozen flowers. These are morning glory flowers with an old rusty nail.







I tested many kinds of leaves. Here are peach.

These are eco prints of red canna lilies. They gave 2 pigments, a blue purple as well as a red violet.

During a visit to Rotorua I collected 5 bottles of water from steaming pools but none of them gave me good prints. However some leaves that my husband and I gathered in the dark gave the print below. I used seawater with rusty nails as the mordant. I was thrilled with the detail.













Finally I tried boiling up some fronds of the male fern ( an introduced weed) to make a dye. I was rewarded with a lovely green.

Spaced warp and weft scarves

I wanted a way to highlight my handspinning and this is one solution. I spaced the handspun warp and then spaced the mohair weft. In the above image you can see the paper spacers placed across the scarf. The fibres used in the warp were merino, alpaca and silk. You can see some pink merino trapped in alpaca and also a fine pink boucle plyed around a thick white merino yarn.

 To further strengthen the interweaving of the warp and weft I gently felted the mohair with warm soapy water. the result was a lovely lacy scarf that is very light and soft to wear.

Bunny angora, silk and merino skein

This skein was a gift for the best knitter I know who had a baby some months ago. I carded the fibres together and then painted the spun yarn with dye.

Shades of grey

I've spun enough dark charcoal grey merino with white silk and white merino and silk to make a sweater but to me the white and charcoal were too eyepopping for the design I had chosen. So I decided to dye the white in shades of grey. After Tracy's course I had enough confidence to try repeat dyeing. My test skein (the top one) used from left no dye, black dye at 0.2%, 0.02%, no dye, black at 1%, 0.1%. The 1% was too dark - I felt it didn't have enough contrast with my other yarn, the dark charcoal.

I opted for no dye, 0.02%, 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.1%, 0.02%, and no dye. I put markers on the bench to show the length to paint each dye. With a large sheet of plastic over the markers, I lay out my cling film and started applying the dye. I"m thrilled with the result. It's what I wanted and each dyed skein is similar to the others. There is no felting and no runover of dye.

I did some other dyeing too and kept all the water I'd used to rinse the brush and the containers. At the finish I tipped this rinse water into the dyepot, added some fleece. This gave me a lovely soft mauve. Previously I would have thrown the rinse water onto the grass. Thank you Tracy.

Here's the two yarns knitted together. You can see the subtle gradations of the dyed yarn.

Majacraft Camp 2014

I recently had a great dose of fibre fun at Majacraft's camp at Rotorua. For a video of camp highlights visit http://www.majacraft.co.nz/blog/?=850/blog/?=850.

Speed Dating with Fibre Tools was my first workshop taken by Esther Rodgers aka Jazzturtle. Jazzturtle Creations I learnt from Esther Rodgers how to use a blending board and after making my first few rolags I was hooked. Luckily I had also chosen a workshop in which participants made a blending board. Even better Owen chose to demonstrate how to attach the carding cloth  using my board so I had mine made for me. On the last morning I sat in the sun happily making little rolags and more little rolags.

 Aren't they beautiful!

 Fibres on the blending board.

I spun mostly a woollen yarn using a long draw on my Majacraft Aura. I wasn't sure that this would work on the Aura because of its pigtail orifice but it did. Well I thought it had worked until I tried plying. I got myself into plying strife because I had accidently spun one bobbin on a different whorl setup to the other. The yarn broke in places because it poorly spun. All the different fibres, merino, corriedale,silk sliver, silk noil and mohair curls that looked so exciting in the rolags were beastly to spin longdraw.

 The mess on the bobbin as I searched for a broken end.

The skein of yarn  - Next time I will take the fibre off the blending board using a diz working back and forth across the board. That way more of the fibres will be in line. The difficulty with the rolags is that they had some inherent twist. Woollen spinning works best with evenly carded rolags. I had hoped I'd get away it - I didn't.

Dream jacket Finished

For years I've wanted to make a handspun version of this pattern. My sister knitted one from commercial yarn and it was a showstopper. People kept stopping her to admire it.

The blue and wine yarns were spun from Corriedale from the Anna Gratton of The Little Wool Company. I

carded some purple and pink silk into the blue wool.

The thick and thin of the cuffs was some synthetic yarn I'd had for 30 years. From it I chose the other colours.

The brilliant lime green from the Anna Gratton was the first sliver I chose. I spun it worsted.


I dyed some superwash merino orange then added sari silk. The sari silk was spun together so I unspun it then cut it into 2" (5 cm) lengths that I shredded and carded into the orange.

The final yarn was superwash merino that I painted then spun and chain (Navajo) plyed.

I used several needle sizes - the bands and collar were knitted on the largest needles. The green of the body was knitted on the smallest needles because I wanted it to hug my body and the multiyarn areas were knitted on slightly larger needles because I wanted more stretch there.

Building the stash at Cambridge

At the recent Cambridge Creative Fibres exhibition I indulged myself in some beautiful random dyed sliver from Lyn Walsh of Fibres to Go. I had seen her colourway, Paua, before and couldn't wait to get some. The colours are taken from the inner shell of the New Zealand paua or abalone.

I bought 300 g of merino (80%) and silk (20%) dyed predominately in blues, turquoise and green with splashes of pink.  I've decided to spin the sliver my version of fine then Navaho (chain) ply the singles.

I was half way through spinning the first length when I had an idea. If I wanted longer lengths of a colour I could spin from either end of each 100g skeins whenever the colours at the ends were the same. So I've decided to use the yarn I've already spun for sleeves and the rest for areas of knitting that have more stitches.

Another length that begged to come home with me was this one of 19 micron merino dyed in jewel colours. At this stage I think it will likely become a scarf.

My final purchase was a 0.7 kg share in a white alpaca fleece from Ridgedale Alpacas in Katikati. The soft locks are long and have a lovely crimp. I'm looking forward to washing, dyeing and spinning alpaca for the first time.

one lock of alpaca