Yarn can be vibrant or parchment subtle, delicately soft or robustly strong. Fleeces collected from obliging farmers may be short-stapled with a crisp crimp or long and silky. Even as the fibre is spun and the yarn wound on the creel, its final character only really appears in the finished skein.
Scotch Blackface, Jacob, Charolais, Suffolk, Zwartbles and the divine Wensleydale have all passed through my wheel. Now alpaca fleeces have arrived, with their cloud-like softness.
Gardening space gradually fills with dye plants, although plenty of colour is already close at hand in berries, bark and weeds. The traditional dyes — madder, indigo, dyer’s weld, woad and all those plants ending in tinctoria — find a plot to grow in the garden.
Lichen-dyed alpaca bouclé — parchment shades, with texture doing the talking.
From Ewe to Skein
Turn up the sound — and listen to the wheel at work.
Colour from Nature
Colour is gathered from the garden and the landscape — leaves, flowers, berries, bark and the occasional obliging weed. Each dye pot is an experiment, and the fibre often has ideas of its own.
