Twinkle, Twinkle & Kaleidoscope

I've just spent the last 4 day's sitting on my sofa crocheting.
I want to finish Twinkle, Twinkle as soon as possible as I want to start concentrating on the Kaleidoscope Club Blanket.
At the moment I'm obsessed with Twinkle, I need to finish it as I've started the club blanket and I know once I get stuck in I won't be able to do anything else,
 I've taken a few sneaky peak photo's of the club blanket. I want to show you what it looks like so far, but I want it to be secret, so I've tried not to give too much away.

This photo is the whole blanket (so far), its the back folded into quarters, I haven't sewn the ends in yet, just in case the colours are wrong and I have to move them around.

This is a close up of the front.

This is what Twinkle looked like on Thursday morning.

And this is what it looked like last night before I went to bed.

And a few shots taken in daylight over the weekend, the colours are truer. It hasn't been blocked and so it looks lumpy.
And I'm going to run out of the background colour, I'm trying to dye some more, but the chances are it will be totally different, so I have to work out what to do next.......

Lynmouth Storm - 2nd of November 2013

We live in Lynton which is half way up a hill,  at the bottom of the hill is Lynmouth, which is 2 minutes drive away.
About a week ago we had a severe weather warning for a massive Atlantic storm, the storm didn't really happen here, although I know other parts of the country were badly affected.
But we had our storm on Saturday.

It was high tide at 5 pm, so Phil and I decided to venture out to buy fish and chips for our tea and see what the sea looked like.
We weren't disappointed, as we drove down the hill the sea looked higher than the land, I have never seen it look so dramatic.
Stupidly we had left the camera in the office and so the following photo's were taken with my iPhone.
The photos are dark, because it was getting dark

This is from outside the fish and chip shop looking west towards the Valley of the Rocks.

This was taken from the same place, if you look carefully you can see a small black line, which was a surfer, there were several out surfing - Mentalists!!

The harbour and the Rhenish tower, which shows how high the sea was.
The 2 Lyn rivers meet at Lynmouth, there is a small harbour with a wall that divides the harbour from the river, the tide was so high the wall had disappeared completely.

We walked the dogs over the bridge to the other side of the river, this photo is taken east across the bay looking towards Countisbury hill, you can see a very windswept Phil and Loki, (there is a small black dot in the distance which is Tinks)

And another shot from the same place looking west, the boats you can see are inside the harbour, the harbour wall was under water. When we walked back over the bridge the water had flooded the road in front of the buildings and waves were crashing over the wall in all directions.

The noise of the wind and water crashing twinned with twilight and the fact that the whole village had turned out to look at the sea made it a very surreal experience.
In a very strange way it was magical and I'm glad we braved the storm.
The video below isn't brilliant, but it will give you an idea.

Limited Colour & Experiments

As you already know NDS has had an incredibly busy year, we've done 6 shows and dyed hundreds and hundreds of kilo's of wholesale.
This has meant we have had to stick to our rainbow range.
I spoke to one of our ladies at Ally Pally who commented that our colours have been a "samey" all year.
I understood exactly what she meant, our colour's have had the same names all year, although there has been a huge difference in shades due to the changes in the water, our water comes from a spring off the moor and the rainfall affects the minerals that are washed through the rocks.
For example last year it rained all summer and this year its been sunny and dry, so our colours have been different, the colours also change with the seasons.

We only use 5 dye plant's - Indigo, Fustic, Logwood, Cochineal and Madder, these are the dyes that work best for us, but they limit the colours we can achieve.
Mordants can also alter the dye colours, we also only use alum and cream of tartar which again limits our range.
Chemical dyers have a huge palette of colours to work with and so its a lot easier for them to come up with new colour combinations

Anyway Daisy and I had planned to spend a couple of weeks in the summer experimenting, but we were just too busy and it never happened.
While we were dyeing for Ally Pally I had a bit of a mental blip and dyed far too much Dazzling 4 ply blues, yellows and greens.
So last week we started over-dyeing and experimenting with it.

This is what we did last week........
They'll all be in tomorrow's update at 7 pm UK time, which you will find HERE
We dyeing the rest of my mental blip at the moment, so there will be more next week.
And the week after we'll be playing with white yarn, I can't wait.........

Twinkle, Twinkle - When a plan goes wrong

After all the show chaos and meeting all my immediate deadlines I finally have time to design what I feel like.
I do have the Kaleidoscope club blanket to make, which does have a deadline, but as I've already finished January there is no urgent rush.

So I have been playing with some idea's and come up with a new blanket design - "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"
Its not symmetrical which is a huge challenge for me, my brain works symmetrically so I have to force myself to not try and rearrange the design.
Its also a mix of colour, rather than blending the colours I am using whatever comes out of my wool basket.
Over the past few months I have begun to realise that you like mixed colours rather than blended colours.
My Lily blanket and Lula scarf are still best sellers and sell more than my newer more organised designs.
I love colour mixes as well as blends, so I don't mind designing some new ones.

Twinkle, Twinkle is the result, made with Godiva HT which is soft and snuggly - one of my favourite blanket yarns.
I thought it might be a nice idea to publish the pattern before Christmas so we could produce starter kits to put on the site so you could buy them as gifts.
It started off like this a couple of weeks ago. I tend to make a swatch then block it to make sure the design is working and at this stage I was happy.
The colours and focus aren't quite right in the following photo's, some were taken with my phone and others were taken inside, so they are all a bit off. I normally photograph all my designs outside as the natural dye colours look their best in nature :-)
The colours of the wool at the bottom of the page are the correct ones and colours I am using in the blanket.

Then I did a bit more, even though I still liked it I decided that the dark background was wrong, it stood out and made the central colour blur, so I changed it, which was/is not an easy job!
To start with I couldn't come up with a background I liked, most of them took too much emphasis off the stars, I really liked a mosaic of blues, aquas and greens, but all the blue stars disappeared into the background.
Eventually I came up with all the little circles.
The photo below shows the existing dark background and the circles I was experimenting with.

Like a good crochet motif maker I had sewn in almost all my ends, so for the past 10 days I have been cutting out all the solid dark blue/motifs and replacing them.
Considering I'd almost finished 2 sides of background its taken me ages, a lot longer to cut and frog than it took me originally to crochet and sew in the ends.

This was how it looked yesterday afternoon when I came home from work.
Its progressed a bit further as I worked on it last night, I've almost finished replacing the dark background motifs and am back to the place where I started cutting and frogging.
If you look closely you can see all the ends I haven't sewn in, I want to make sure its right before I commit myself and have to cut and frog all over again!

 The photo below was taken with the flash and has bleached the colours, but it does show what the blanket looks like when it is the right way around, so I've included it.

This weeks NDS yarn update contains an awful lot of Godiva HT, including mini Skeins and colour collections. Twinkle, Twinkle uses all our rainbow colours, so if you want to make it now is the time to start collecting skeins. The update will be live tomorrow (31st of October 2013) at 7 pm and you will be able to find it HERE