The final update & Easter

Last week's dyeing schedule was dyeing for NDS's final update.
We started off with 35 kilo's of white yarn and not much idea of what to do with it.
After lots of discussion we decided to dye the whole of NDS's rainbow, so we did :-)

As you can imagine dyeing, washing, drying and winding 35 kilo's is a long process, we still haven't finished dyeing it all and I don't think all of it is going to be ready for this weeks update, so instead of having another last update we will be adding the extra's as soon as we've finished them.

Which means that we will probably still have a few to add early next week, although the sun is shining so they might be ready by the end of this week, who knows... :-)

The designing part of the week started with me publishing April's Zodiac installment, I've sent it to the member's but haven't had the time to add it to Ravelry or Etsy yet.

Then instead of concentrating on the things that needed to be done I worked on my colour wheel.

As it had been sitting in a basket for a week I was able to look at it with new eyes and discovered there were a couple of issues/mistakes.

In the first photo you can clearly see that the third round of circles was too big, so I made them smaller, which would mean I had to fit in new fillers to fill the gaps.

Then I realised I had made a mistake and mixed up 2 of the second round circles so they were in the wrong place.

Unfortunately a lot of you couldn't see what I was talking about so I kept posting more photo's to try and show you where I had gone wrong.

 

I couldn't decide whether to correct the mistake or not, so I thought I would carry on crocheting to see if when I added the fillers it would be noticeable in the final piece.

And it is, also I am not happy with the look of the wheel, the fillers pull the circles out of shape and you can clearly see where the circles are joined, its far too messy for my liking, so I need to do a new colour wheel (or 2).

I realised that this swatch was not going to be a blanket because I was unhappy with it, so I have decided to publish it as a cushion cover.

Maybe there will be a series of cushion covers before I finally settle on a design I am happy enough with to put the time into a blanket.

I went for a wool walk on Saturday.
Starting off at Lynton Town Hall which is at the end of my road and finishing at the Iron age hill fort on the top of Hollerday Hill.

As my big girl had come to visit us for Easter I took the whole of Sunday off.
We had lunch at The Hunters Inn in Heddon Valley.
Its an amazing place, a hidden river valley full of peacocks, so far off the beaten track that its quite difficult to get to, but has a beautiful hotel with a huge beer garden that is perfect for sunny afternoons.
A lot of the valley is owned by the National Trust so is normally quite busy with walkers in the summer.
It looks misty in these photo's, but was actually quite sunny and warm and of course I took my crochet!

Then my crochet had a little bit of a pub crawl with Tinks and Me and Daisy and her boyfriend Adam.
Poor Phil missed out as he had to take our big girl back to Taunton to catch her train back to London.
Our first (or second if you count Hunters Inn) stop was the Beggars Roost, which is just round down the lane from our dye studio and has just reopened after being closed for several years.

Our next and final stop was The Rising Sun in Lynmouth which is our "local", I had a lovely wool photo set up, but my stupid iPhone battery died, so I wasn't able to take it.

Yesterday I mended my mistake and did a bit of gardening in my tiny courtyard, with my helpful assistants who take up the whole courtyard!
Its not easy re-potting and pruning when you have to keep moving a giant German Shepard!

My design process

I am often asked how I design my blankets, so I thought I'd share a photo diary of my process.
I don't start out with a drawing, my inspiration comes from many varied sources, quite a few memories, the yarn and colour I use, the place I live and lots of experimentation.

I like to develop an idea and make several variations of the same design, I have been unable to do this while designing for NDS as our yarn customers want something new and exciting rather than the same old thing again and again.
But now I am about to become a full time designer/artist I can indulge myself and have promised myself I will create exactly what I want to create rather than create something that has deadlines and guidelines

The following photo's are of the development of my Kissing Circles blankets both past and present.

The very beginnings of my Kissing Circles started in 2008 when I designed my Circles blanket
It was a 3 round circle within a square.

 

At the beginning of 2014 I decided to re-visit circles for the first blanket of my new book, so I used the same pattern as a base for my new design, however I discovered that if I made the circles with more rounds they didn't lay flat.
So I searched the internet for crochet circles patterns and became increasingly frustrated as I couldn't make any of them lay flat.
So I ended up putting several of the patterns together and then taking bits away to make a almost flat circle.

  

Book blankets 1 and 2 had big circles set within a square.

I spent the next few months designing squares and triangle blankets for the book, then mid June 2014 I decided to play with the circles again, this time I wanted to just have circles on their own with no squares surrounding them.
My lovely Valerie told me circles on their own don't work as there are gaps between them which makes wonky spaces.
I hate being told I can't do something, I'm too stubborn to listen so set out to prove her wrong.
So I played around until I managed to design a filler I was happy with.

 While researching circle layouts and how to fit them together I discovered Descartes Kissing Circles theorum, even though I only understand it on a visual level I find it fascinating.
And so Kissing Circles was born, it was made in a hurry and ended up a lot smaller than I intended as I wanted to get it finished and on the wall for the Fibre East show in July.

 My next Kissing Circles design was Myrtle Scarf, its a different circles layout and was inspired by colour of the berries that grow in the East Lynn gorge.
Myrtle hasn't had much love, I blame the photo's and my issues with ancient laptops with failing screens, but I guess it might be because a scarf doesn't have the same impact as a blanket.

   

In November 2014 we went to see the Kaffe Fasset exhibition in Bath, I love Kaffe and have always loved Kaffe. I had a bit of an ephiphany which lead to the decision to mothball NDS.
It also made me realise that I was allowed to use the colours I wanted because even though he doesn't realise it Kaffe has told me its ok.
So I re-made Kissing Circles and the new version is called Kissing Kaffe
The photo's are a bit rubbish, so I need to take them again

   

I decided to make another scarf in a new layout, but didn't get very far as I couldn't get the colours right.
Even though I struggled with the colours I loved the layout, so put it to one side to come back to later.

 

Over the past few weeks I have been talking about adding a new colour page to my blog.
A lot of people have contacted me panicking because they won't be able to buy NDS yarn to make their blankets with in the future and I need to give them a solution.
The solution needs to be a page full of colour that makes it easy to choose which yarns to buy, so I've been playing with tiny circles.

    

  

This weekend my colour page swatches turned into a new blanket, the photo's below show how it developed over the course of a couple of days...

  

   

    

There was an emergency trip to John Arbon Textiles who lives just around the corner and has his shop just around the other corner when I realised that I would need a neutral colour for the fillers, my original plan was to use very pale grey, but accidentally (on purpose) bought a slightly darker shade than I wanted, so ended up using a old NDS dark purple instead.
But I did buy a very dark grey Knit by Numbers DK, which is lucky as I'm planning to use this version as a sample piece to display on my stand and to make the real blanket in John Arbon's Knit by Numbers DK.

 

So watch this space to see how my Kissing circles develop and whether I will ever manage to publish a colour page :-)

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.