Colour wheel's & reminiscing

Good morning world

I feel like I didn't do much last week, except reminiscing
NDS only has 4 week's left and we still have a mountain to dye, its a race against time and I'm not sure if we are winning or not...

Although on Monday night I did take the dogs down to the Valley of Rocks for their evening walk in the rain.
We arrived just as the sun was setting, it was a small flash of orange on the horizon.
But by the time I had let the dogs off their leads and got my camera out of my pocket it had gone.
But I took this photo anyway as I love the silver (wet) road stretching off into the glowing distant sea.

And then we dyed, dyed, dyed and dyed some more.
I discovered so old jars of dyes hidden in the back of the dye room.
The dyes were all the actual plants rather than extracts, I'm fairly certain they were dyes we had brought from Suffolk and never used as the water was too acidic.
So rather than compost them I decided to give them one last try for old times sake, but this time adding lots of chalk to the dye baths to neutralise the acid.
Some of the results were amazing, the yellow is weld, we were so excited about the colour that we bought some more to use for this weeks dye session, which is for the last ever NDS update.

 

We also found some alkanet and brazilwood, the brazilwood dyed a pale rose colour and the alkanet dyed an amazing range of silver, I'm afraid a few of the silver skeins are due to get lost ;-)
Using these dyes again brought back some of the excitement and rekindled my love of dyeing.
For a long time I've felt we've been on an endless treadmill of update's, shows, kits and dyed to order's, dyeing the same colours over and over again, fighting with the dyes, panicking about if we'd managed to get the right colours, panicking that our customer's would be disappointed because we hadn't managed to get the exact shade they needed.

Then I fought with the stupid computers for 2 day's and we had a yarn update.

We have 2 ancient laptop's, the screen on mine is going and Photoshop is corrupted, so I have to upload my iphone photo's onto my laptop, transfer them to Dropbox, edit the photo's on Phil's laptop (which also has a failing screen, but not as bad as mine) save them in Dropbox and then go back to my laptop to add them yarn to the site as Phil's laptop moves at snails pace!!

It takes me 2 day's every week to prepare the update.

I've been saving up for a new laptop and about 6 weeks ago I almost had enough, the then stupid Beast needed a new starter motor and turbo, so all my computer money disappeared into my menopausal Land Rover and I had to start saving again.

If I was a sensible person I would sell the Beast and get a reliable cheaper to run car, but as soon as I get behind the Beast's wheel I remember why I love it so much and forgive it all its middle aged problems.

After all I'm a middle aged woman and no one has sold me because I'm a bit faulty - yet!!

By Friday I was completely physically broken, which was ok as Friday is the beginning of my designing weekend.

I was so tired and have so much to do that I couldn't work out what to do first.

So I photographed some of my stash instead :-)

The second photo is the contents of the wooden box on the second shelf down. 

Its full of the embroidery silks that I dyed in the very early NDS days before I started dyeing yarn.

After a lot of dithering I decided I'd do some work on the blog colour page I keep talking about.

Over the course of Friday and Saturday it went from colour page to blanket design.

So I'm no further forward with the blog colour page, but I do have a new blanket.

I've taken lots and lots of photo's over the weekend, but I'm saving most of them for another blog post which will be about my designing process.