Rhubard root dye

After my first experiment with avocado dye and following the great workshop on dyeing with plants this summer I decided to try one of the recipes at home. I really liked the colours that we got from working with rhubarb root, especially when we did a test with an older dye bath (already a bit smelly and covered in mould) which gave a very surprising dark red instead of the orangy-yellow of the fresh bath. While I didn't manage to recreate quite the exact colour it was still a nice result.

I got a whole root - which is huge, by the way - and chopped it up in very small pieces. I then left them outside in the sun to dry for a few days until they were really hard and felt like wood. I wanted to preserve them for future dye-projects and my freezer was to small for these quantities of root-chips.  I think the result is the same but maybe the colours are a bit more vibrant with the fresh root.

I used my hand-spun yarn (the first attempt ever so excuse me if it looks more like a rope than actual knitting yarn) and I divided my skein to be able to work with different shades. I also used alum for mordanting as I did with the avocado because I forgot to buy the citric acid - less "natural" but it worked just as well. As you can see, the first dye-bath resulted in a  much darker, mustard yellow shade.

The second dye-bath produced a lighter shade of yellow but had patches of much more orangy colours as well. I wonder if it had turned into something even more reddish if I had left it longer?

Now it's just the question: what to knit with this unreasonably chunky yarn?

Finally, a note to myself: When dying yarn in cooking pots on the kitchen hob next time, wash them properly and stash them FAR away from actual cooking pots. I'm not sure how poisonous alum is but the boyfriend was definitely not happy when he noticed that he had been cooking (and eating) spaghetti from a pot that I had mordanted my yarn in.... and I was worried that I might have damaged his health permanently. My bad!

Petit poisson rouge

I fell in love with this cardigan the first time I saw it on Sigrid's blog. I knew I wanted to knit one but the pattern was not published yet so I contacted her for a test knit and, hooray, she shared the draft pattern with me.

The actual knitting process was quite straight forward: after I managed to find the right needle size for my stash of red and white Latvian yarn (and one failed attempt to do so) I just followed the pattern which is very detailed and well written. The basic chart is repeated many times so I knew it by heart pretty quickly and could take it everywhere to progress faster on my knitting.

The only thing I changed was the construction of the sleeves. Sigrid suggests picking up stitches around the armholes of the bodice and knitting the sleeves top-down but I had a bad experience with this method on my "Spencer" cardigan. It's difficult to knit in the round because you have to keep turning the knitting, including the bodice which is quite bulky at that stage, so it gets annoying.

Instead I reversed the instructions and started at the cuffs, knitting my way up to the shoulders and sewing the sleeves tot he bodice instead. Works just as well,  except that my sleeves turned out a tiny bit short in the end (but that's my fault and can be fixed easily). It's also a bit tight but that is a result of me messing up the gauge I think and I still like it a lot.

My verdict: I love my "petit poisson rouge" (little gold fish) and it does not take as long to knit as it looks like! 

Summer in the city

 

Even though we have a beautiful autumn at the moment, summer is clearly over when is starts getting dark at 5 pm. But I did manage to snap a few nice pictures of  moments and places in Brussels (when I wasn't traveling for once). Of course I also forgot a lot of things like my favourite ice cream place, drinks on sunny terraces with friends, picnics in the park, festivals, concerts, general fun. But it happened and that's the most important thing.

Now I'm enjoying the sunny autumn with all the colourful leaves and still enough sun to have coffee on my amazing balcony - can you see how much my plants have grown since the spring? I'm seriously proud of my mini-gardening effort. And somehow I still found time to knit, I'm surprised myself when I'm looking back at the results.

In 2 months, it's already Christmas and I'm not at all prepared for winter. In the meantime, we also have to find a new flat and manage the whole business of moving house, something that I'm not particularly looking forward to. But for now it's still time to enjoy.