A lovely parcel arrived today, some of
Dijanne Cevaal's wonderful hand-dyed fabric.
Dijanne is relocating to Europe, and offered some parcels of surplus fabric which she couldn't take with her. It's years since I bought fabric from her, but I am always amazed at the intensity of colour she achieves with her hand dyeing. These didn't disappoint.
These three are my favourites - a rich burnt orange, a deep textured blue/green, and the wonderful murky shibori-style patterns on the top one. I have no idea what I'll do with them, but I'm sure they'll be used and treasured to the last scrap.
I've had a bit of a re-think on the crochet hexagons. The first ones I showed you were done with acrylic yarn. Now, given that I'm going to have to make several hundred of the little critters, and it's going to take months, not weeks, and if I finish the rug it will likely be a family heirloom; well then, who ever heard of an ACRYLIC heirloom??
So I'll have to use wool. Expensive. But wait, I have wool - a big box full stashed away at the top of the linen press. A rummage through the box yielded quite a few balls of suitable colour, enough to make a start, anyway.
I made a sample hexagon using the pattern I showed in the last post, just to check for tension and size. Now it's a funny thing, but wool yarn works up quite differently from acrylic. I didn't like my pretty pattern nearly as much in wool.
I tried several hexagon patterns I found on the Web, but they all had too many spaces for my liking. I think a crochet rug/blanket/afghan is meant to keep you warm, and large gaps kinda defeat that purpose. After some experimenting, I came up with this pattern.
I found I had to work the fourth round in half treble(hdc) instead of treble(dc) to get them to lie flat, but I think these will work. Join-as-you-go doesn't work very well in half-treble, so I'm going to stitch them together in the good old-fashioned way, which I really don't mind; it's the darning in of ends I hate. So I'm taking care of the loose ends as I finish each motif, and will probably stitch them together as I go too. I'll keep you updated on progress (12 made so far)
I'm more accustomed to dyeing cotton fabric with fibre reactive dye, and I always wear gloves for that, but this was just food colouring and vinegar, and it didn't occur to me that it might stain. (It wore off pretty soon)
so I decided to try my hand at acid dyeing.
I used little dropper bottles of food dye from the supermarket, and found my instructions here.
I used an old stainless steel saucepan, and heated the wool in its dyebath on the stove. It was fun to watch the water turn clear as it heated up.
It worked fairly well, the first two balls were a bit light, but useable,
the next three were better. It's an amazing process, much faster than fibre reactive dyeing - and not so messy.
