Ends & Picks

Any Guesses?

Comments (3)

By Melissa, February 6, 2009 11:41 pm

I changed the Fair Isle motif we were given for class a bit. And by a bit, I mean I completely redesigned it.

2009-2-6

Any ideas what it might be?

Classes, Knitting | Fair Isle, hat, Knitting

Fair Isle

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By Melissa, February 5, 2009 9:05 pm

Rhymeswithfun and I had a great night last night. We started off our evening with a delicious dinner at Snap! They have the cutest lights and quite tasty pizza.

2009-2-4

Afterward, we headed up the street to Crafty Planet for our first night of Fair Isle class. We had the choice of leg warmers or a hat. Both of us decided to go the hat route and to design our own patterns. Here’s what I have so far:

2009-2-5

I’m really glad I forced myself to learn how to knit continental last year since that makes knitting with yarn in both hands sooo much easier. Now to just get that whole “tension” thing under control…

Classes, Knitting, Travel | Fair Isle, Knitting, rhymeswithfun

Indigo Dyeing

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By Melissa, October 4, 2008 7:17 pm

Today I took Indigo Dyeing at The Fiber Studio with Virginia Parent. What a great class!

Indigo dyeing is fascinating. The dye vat is a yellowish-green and so are the fibers…until you introduce oxygen. As soon as you pull your wool out of the bath and the fibers hit air, the color turns to green and then blue. The color transformation happened too fast for me to grab my camera in time, but it was beautiful.

I dipped my yarn three times and what fantastic results!

Classes, Dyeing | Dyeing, Yarn

Double Dye!

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By Melissa, August 31, 2008 2:22 pm

My friend Suzie and I just finished up a two part class at the Textile Center called Double Dyeing. It was all about shibori dyeing and taught by Sandra Brick, a wonderful teacher who was great for pulling me away from my left-brained habits and pushing my comfort zone to the limit. Put purple next to orange? Pink next to green? Not in my manufacturing world you don’t – you get brown muck. But in Double Dyeing, you get truly beautiful results.

Shibori is the Japanese word for putting patterns on cloth by using several different methods of dyeing. In our first class we learned how to braid, twist, clamp, and bind silk scarves. When submerged in the dye baths, the areas of fabric that are held tightly together resist the color and leave behind beautiful patterns.

We also did some discharge dyeing. We took black cloth, clamped it, bleached it to reveal any color that might be underneath, and then reclamped & redyed it.

Sandra took us to the next level by having us take our single dyed scarves, re-clamp/twist/bind/braid them and throw them into another dye bath. The results were stunning.

Our second week we learned the arashi, or pole-dyeing, method. We used big fat wine bottles instead of poles (or trees, like the Japanese do), but the idea is the same.