Trowie Allover in Blues

A blog post is long overdue, but my days have been too full of spinning, weaving, and writing (other than my blog) - it has been fun.

Now it is time to catch up here.

One commission I had was to incorporate blues into my Trowie design. And why had I not thought of this before? Blue is my favourite colour and I have never used it in a design. But a customer asked and I was in heaven, knitting in blue.

The request was to change the black and moorit to blue, and the customer had good colour judgement as well as good taste. The colours were now 2 blues 2 greys and a light fawn. Fawns always go well with blue, but the 2 greys I knew would pick up colour from the blues and look beautiful. I dyed grey yarn with logwood for a dark blue to repace the black, and a lighter grey yarn dyed in indigo for the lighter blue to replace the moorit.

The result was, I think, stunning - but I would like anything is blue. You can decide for yourselves.

Sunset

Sunsets never fail to impress me. Last night was no exception. Today has been a beautful , with warm spring sunshine, almost no clouds in the sky, and very light winds. Maybe tonight we will have a great sunset too.

But, here are last nights photos.....



 Starting with the western sky...

and moving a little towards the south west.......



now looking south west....



looking south........

and even in the eastern sky.

The north sky was a delicate shade of pink too, but too light to show up on my camera.

Next blog will be on textiles, I promise.

LACE CANDLE LIGHTS

So have I used any of the madder yarn yet? Well, yes I have, but not very much. Following the success of the Merrie Lace instalation at Mareel, our new music and cinema venue in Lerwick, one of my daughters came up with this idea for lace lights.



and the same candle lights taken with less light.



2 light shades of madder yarn







2 in darker shades



and then with less light to see their reflection























I made a few as Christmas gifts and now have them for sale. At the moment they are all in madder reds and will all be in lace weight yarns, but more colours will be added as I have them.



A Madder Shawl

The Christmas and New Year holidays are over, even Auld Yule here in Shetland has passed and it is time to get back to normal. Christmas decoration have been taken down and put away for next year, and hopefully most of the pine needles, the tinsel and the dust has gone too.

So I thought it was time to let you see the shawl I made for a birthday present. The birthday was on the 30th of November so I could not mention it here before then just in case the birthday girl saw it and made a connection.



The Madder Shawl





The request was for a shawl in Madder oranges. Getting the right shade of madder can be difficult. Usually getting the orange/red colour is easy except when you get really good quality Madder, which is what happened. I did a test dye but on dying the handspun lace yarn it was just too red. The second try was luckily just right. It did take time though as some more yarn needed to be spun.

Yarns used in the shawl

There are 11 colours in the shawl, 7 dyed colours and 4 natural colours. The dying was done on white, 3 grey shades and 3 fawn shades. I included a touch of the 3 fawn shades that had been dyed and a Shetland black. The lace edge and the centre was in the mig grey from the first dye batch after I reduced the red by cooking it again in onion. It adding just a little bit of madder red to the mix.

And I still have a nice batch of handspun lace yarn in beautful madder reds to use.