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.

Rats nests and rainbows

At the beginning of last week began with me deciding for the third time that book blanket number 8 was wrong and that I had to rethink the colours again!!
When I compared version 1 with version 2 I realised that it was the indigo rather than the other colours, it looked dirty against the other colours, like faded jeans and the darker background was what I liked best about version 1.
So more frogging ensued and then some new swatching, which I am 100% happier with.
I also added some extra colours, version 2 had 9 colours, version 3 has 19!
I'm beginning to realise removing colours from a blanket is a bad idea, when I'm not happy with a design I need to add rather than subtract colour.

I only had 3 skeins of background indigo, so I needed to dye more, which I did. 

Unfortunately I was being lazy and re-dyed some already indigo dyed skeins, I stupidly decided to just add 1 tie rather than the normal 4, the colour was perfect, but when I removed the 1 tie they ended up like this!! 

700 gms of rats nest

DOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The rats nest is surprising satisfying to work with, luckily I make motifs, so I can just pull a strand until it stops moving, break it, make a motif and then pull another strand. I've already used one of the 100 gms nests and started the next nest.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we dyed the next 30 kgs and Tinks guarded the wool from potential wool burglars.

On Thursday I edited about 50 wool photo's, and I looked out the office window at the sun. 

Our Exmoor internet slug was chewing up the bandwidth and it took me all day to edit and load them onto the website before the Thursday night update.

Friday was a designing day, also the eclipse day, I knew I couldn't look at it and so there for was desperate to look, so I stayed inside, Tinks guarded the window to stop me being stupid and making myself blind.

I spent all day making these tiny circles for my "colour" page.

Then we went to the pub and looked at the really high tide, the tide kind of made up for the fact

I hadn't seen the eclipse. 

Tish brought her brand new puppy for his first Friday night and so there were lots of puppy snuggles.

Orion is Rottweiler/Great Dane cross, so is going to be gigantic

 

On Saturday I discovered someone had taken my tiny colour circles idea and posted it as their own.

I know this kind of thing happens all the time, but I find it incredibly upsetting, I put my heart and soul into what I do and would never copy anyone else without their permission or give them credit for doing it first.

I've blogged about being copied before and had numerous comments from people saying "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", which is probably true, but I find very difficult to accept. 

Its so difficult to explain how much it hurts, one comparison that might make sense is culture's who believe that having their photograph taken is stealing part of their soul.

I know I'm being a bit extreme, but this moment in time life is emotionally difficult for us, I am closing NDS which has been part of my life for so long and I already feel that I am losing part of myself, so losing an idea just makes it worse.

Anyway I decided to cheer myself up with a long walk up Hollerday Hill in the sun with Tinks and my Rainbow to take lots of photo's. 

Because however much you take from me I have this in my life which fills my heart and makes me happy.

Blog Guilt & Instagram

As we get closer and closer to the end of NDS I am becoming more aware of my need to blog, after all this blog will become my main site when the NDS website is closed.
But we are so busy preparing for the end of NDS and dyeing our last mountain of yarn that I just don't have a minute to spare, plus my brain is so full of wool that I don't really have much to say.

However I am finding the time to post on Instagram, as its just one click of the camera and a sentence description.
My new cunning plan is to try and write a blog post every Monday about my previous week on Instagram including a selection of the photo's maybe even some unpublished ones with a few extra sentences.
If my cunning plan works I might even continue with it after NDS has gone, it is a diary of my life and makes blogging a lot easier as I don't have to come up with new things to say.

So without further ado here are my last week's photo's (I've included a couple from the week before because it was the weekend and I take more photo's over the weekend due to the fact I am working at home and having more time to photograph what I'm doing.

Friday - 3rd of March 2015 - Weekly outing to the Rising Sun, Lynmouth

The day's are getting longer, the tourists are beginning to reappear, I guess even though there's still several months to go summer is on its way.
Although you can't see them in this photo, the surfers were out, which seemed odd because the sea was quite calm, obviously the surf was better than it looked.

Saturday - 4th & Sunday 5th of March 2015

It was a Zodiac weekend, I spent nearly 2 day's working on April for both blankets.

I am struggling to keep up with Zodiac, I really hoped I would of finished the crochet blanket by now and would only have Phil's knitted blanket to sew the ends in and crochet together.

But in reality Phil is now knitting July and I'm still sewing April's ends in, 

I have my fingers crossed that once NDS has gone I can concentrate on both Zodiac's and get them finished by the summer.

These 3 photo's are of the weekends progress, April knitted and Crocheted versions waiting to be constructed and the 3rd photo is of April finished and the knitted May motifs waiting to have their ends sewn.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - 6/7/8/9th of March 2015

Dyeing, dyeing, dyeing.

I normally only spend the first 3 days of the week at the studio, but we have nearly 200 kgs to dye before the end of NDS and about 4 weeks to go, so its all hands on deck.

Even though I love making colour I am very frustrated about my lack of crochet time.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday - 10/11/12th of March 2015

I had 3 whole crochet day's, which was lucky as after 4 day's dyeing I was exhausted and broken.

My crochet plan for the weekend was to produce some swatches to put on the blog to illustrate my new (unwritten) "How to choose colour" page.

  

But when I got to this stage of development I realized that there was another Kissing Circles blanket in the pipeline and I hadn't really done what I set out to achieve!

 

I'd really like to spend some time developing the idea now, but can't afford the time, so have consoled my self with adding another 10 colours to book blanket 8, which is now heading into its 3rd remake.

I'm beginning to panic about my book deadline, I've hardly done any work on it since December, except remake No 8 3 times.

But when NDS is gone I will have 8 months to make 5 blankets and write all the patterns.

 

And finally yesterday was Mother's Day.

My darling husband had a huge fail on breakfast, I'm really pleased to be able to share this photo as I'm well known for my inability to cook and he NEVER burns things :-)

 

And then Daisy took us/me to lunch at Porlock Weir, which is the most unlike Exmoor place on Exmoor. 

From some angles it reminds me of Bawdsey and Felixstowe Ferry, both places in Suffolk that I had known and lived close to in my previous life.

  

We had lunch at The Cafe, the food was amazing, the best Sunday lunch (except for the home made version) we've had in a long time. And in the evening both of my other children phoned, which made me a very happy mummy :-)

Colour blah, blah, blah.....

As you might of noticed by now most of my blankets contain most of the rainbow colours, I've always loved the "rainbow" and struggle to design anything that doesn't contain most of the colours.
All my best selling blankets are rainbow over doses.

Colour is my "thing" and the main reason I took up dyeing, I loved the idea of making my own colours and even though dyeing for NDS has become a never ending routine of dyeing the same colours over and over again I don't want to give up making my own colour, hence the reason for my Etsy shop (lots more about that at later time)

When I was a small child my Grandad worked as an upholsterer, his attic was his workshop, he had sewing machines, huge bolts of fabric and coloured tacks in boxes I loved being allowed to sit in his workshop while he worked and remember playing with the coloured tacks for hours.
I've always been really excited seeing coloured pencils and paints arranged in art shops and at one point collected home decorating paint charts just so I could look at the colours (Dulux did some particularly good charts for their "Mixed to Order" range.
NDS has given me the chance to make rainbows and pick (steal) colours out of the stock because I like them.

Since we announced the mothballing of NDS one of the questions I have been asked repeatedly asked is "how am I going to be able to make your blankets without NDS yarn?"

So I decided I needed to add a "How to choose colour" page to my blog and started writing a new page, unfortunately or rather luckily for you I had to do a lot of dyeing last week and so didn't finish the page.

Over the weekend I realised that my writing had become very very confusing and that by the end of it you would be far more confused than when you started reading it.

So I need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again, I decided to post it here before I deleted it just in case it was any use.

So it here is.....

"The simple answer is collect Rainbow's.
I don't mean variegated rainbow skeins, I mean collect a rainbow palette of solid or semi solid colours.

I have found the best way to collect a rainbow palette is as follows....

1 - Sort your existing yarn in to yarn weight's for example 4 ply/Fingering, Sport, DK, Worsted, Aran etc
As long as the yarn is all the same metreage it can be used together in the same project.
For example I normally use 4 Ply (400 metre per 100 gms ) and  DK (200/210 metres per 100 gms), recently I have started a Sport/DK (250/260 metre per 100 gms) Collection.
So I have 3 yarn weight collections.

2 - For each yarn weight collection - take out all the variegateds and put them to one side, they don't really belong in a rainbow, but you can normally find a place for them somewhere in your pallette.

3 - Now take one skein out of each batch you have - you might have a whole jumper's worth of yarn in the same colour, but you only need one skein to organize your rainbow.
And separate the skeins out into single rainbow colour collections, for example a red collections, a orange collections etc.

My collections are as follows

Lavender Purple
Violet Purple
Raspberry  Pink
Sugar Pink
Soft Red
Burnt Orange
Yellow/Gold
Lime Green
Apple Green
Turquoise
Mid Blue
Indigo Blue

 The photo below is one my NDS rainbow photo's."

Incidentally I also realised that I need a whole new set of photographs, and have started to experiment with some crochet based layouts, several of which are going to take a bit of work to construct, so watch this space for them.

Please note the inclusion of turquoise in the photo below, I love turquoise and have always been sad that I have never managed to come close to dyeing it with natural dyes.

And don't forget to watch this space for my new re-write of my colour page, which I promise will have less blah, blah, blah confusion :-)

NDS's last ever show......

Last weekend we took The Natural Dye Studio to Unravel for our very last NDS show.
Daisy and I had been so busy in the run up to the show, that we didn't really have much time to think about what it really meant.
I think its best that I tell the story with photo's, because otherwise this blog would end up as a soggy tear stained mess.

So here it is Unravel 2015.

This time the Beast worked, we hired a box trailer, which was a million times better than the flat bed we took to Yarndale.

BUT the 8ft trailer had already been hired so I had to book the 7 ft trailer, it was very touch and go due to the fact that our metal show grids are 7 ft. 

The trailer dimensions were 1/2 an inch bigger than the grids, luckily the trailer had a pointy bit at the front with a metal bar across to support the structure. We packed out the floor with yarn bags and rested the grids on top of the bar and wool, it was all tied together with lots of rope to stop the grids moving and we managed to get to Farnham without any problems.

Set up was easy, which makes a change, we normally have kits and assorted scarves and dummies, but this time the only thing we had was wool, it felt like we were missing vital stand ingredients, but the wool was the big focus so it was ok. 

And the stand looked amazing, I was really happy with it, the lighting made the blankets glow and it was warm and inviting. As you can see we had 2 sections of wool, one either side of the stand, so customers had more space to browse.

What I didn't expect was the response from customers, it was overwhelming, we had a constant flow of feed back to my "End of NDS" blog post, so many people came to tell me I was doing the right thing.

We talked to so many customers with so many stories and so many fond NDS memories, that

its impossible to even start to tell them here.

And so many projects that people brought to the stand to show us and share.

We were given cards, letters and bottles of wine, cake and chocolates.

The out pouring of emotion was very humbling and really brought home to us that we weren't just selling a bit of wool, we were selling happiness and creativity to yarn addicts :-)

Caroline brought her Ermintrude which mind blowing and even more so when she told us it was her first blanket

And Isabelle brought her Kaleidoscope, which was fantastic to see along side with mine on the wall.

And this chunky slub blanket was made with yarn we sold at least 8 or 9 years ago on eBay.

I loved this yarn, unfortunately you didn't, so we stopped dyeing it.

Its still soft and cuddly and the colours are still beautiful....sigh.....

The stand was constantly busy, half the time I had to stand outside in the aisle and chat to customers.

Even when it was quiet the wall of wool still had adoring NDS fans in front of it trying to choose their last skeins.

And then the show was over, this was all we had left to take home, over 40 kgs less than we took with us. If you look closely at this photo you can see that a lot of the remaining pegs only have 1 or 2 skeins on, when we set up there were 5 on each.

Breakdown was fast and furious, after all we didn't have much to pack as the lovely John Arbon took our grids home in his 8 ft trailer.

And then we had a ceremonial throwing away of the stand sign, we had already had to cut a piece off just to fit it in over the yarn, but this seemed like a fitting end to NDS's show career.

This was also the point that Dais and I looked at each other and almost broke down, luckily we both realised what was happening and started talking about jam or some such other nonsense.

If we hadn't I think we would still have been sobbing over each other in a wet car park in Surrey

And now onto new things and the first yarn for my brand new stash.

I have never bought yarn before, so it was a whole new learning curve, I couldn't have it all I had to choose a couple of skeins at a time. I didn't realise how difficult it was being a customer!!

So here is my Unravel haul...

2 x baskets from Injabulo - I always try to treat myself to one of their baskets at the shows, they are guilt free shopping as by buying them I am buying Fair Trade and helping support families in Africa who don't have all the luxuries in life that I have and take for granted.

So you can see it is my duty to buy their baskets, which are perfect for keeping stash and projects in, my wool room is full of them and as I buy new stash I will have to buy more new baskets.....

2 x Easyknits skeins - Although I've always loved the intensity of colour of Jon's yarn I've always thought I needed sunglasses to look at it, but I hope when its mixed in with softer more subtle colours it will look like little electric flashes of colour and give my blankets a new dimension.
Obviously I need to buy a lot more and a bigger range of colours to test my theory.

2 x Skein Queen skeins - Which I have coveted for a long time as Debbie's colours will blend perfectly with my NDS stash and give me a much bigger colour palette.

It felt a bit odd buying from my long time competitors, but they are both valued friends and people I love and respect. I know just how difficult it is to be a indie dyer, and so I want to support them.

I have a list of dyer friends that I want to add to my stash, but they weren't at Unravel so I'll have to wait until Yarndale.

And finally 1 x skein of John Arbon's Knit by Number's
I only have one skein from Unravel, but as John is a very close friend and neighbour and I know where he lives, where his mill is and where his shop is I don't think I need worry about adding to my stash.
John has cleverly created Knit by Number's especially for me without even realising it.
It has the almost the whole rainbow and new colours to fill the gaps are in the pipeline.
Plus there are rumours of a 4 ply Knit by Number's.............