I hate personality quizzes, the sort that try to put you in a category and ask you to choose between a and b or a, b, c, or d for your most likely response to a hypothetical situation. My usual response is “it depends,” or “some of the above,” or “none of the above,” or … More Product vs. Process
Over the past nine months I have been experimenting with the basics of plant dyeing using scavenged materials. The thrill of uncovering beautiful colors hidden inside ordinary plants that I never noticed before, or food waste that I would have thrown away without a thought, could almost have distracted me from the fact that I … More What Happens After You Dye?
After the weekend I spent recently in the UK doing plant dyeing with friends there, I came home with a fistful of pH strip packages and a lot of curiosity about what my dye baths would do if I made half of a bath acidic and the other half alkaline. Back in the winter I … More pHun with pH
Ever since I started plant-dyeing a lot, I have thought of travel as more than a chance to see my friends in other places or to sit in a sardine tin of a seat eating airplane food: it has become a chance to see what plants are growing wild in other environments and to collect what my … More The Witches of Warwickshire
When ponchos had their moment in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I was immune to their charms. I’d been a few years too young to participate in the hippie movement, and by the time I was old enough to leave my parents’ house and live independently, the proto-punk cynicism of the hippies’ younger siblings caused me … More More Than It Seams
I knitted a sweater using a pattern recently, which in the general run of knitting blogs is not a news flash, but for me it is, as an exception to my general preference to figure out and knit my own ideas. The pattern was Stephen West’s Reis, a very simple yoked pullover with proportions straight … More A Matter of Scale
Someone on the natural dyeing thread of my Ravelry group asked me if it’s possible to dye with black rice. There wasn’t a lot to refer to when I googled the question, but I ran across a blog post that showed a bit of wool roving dyed in boiled black rice, and it was a … More Black Beans and Rice for Dye-ner
I took up yarn dyeing last fall using plants I collected during my walks, donations from my sister’s and neighbors’ gardens, and onion skins scraped up out of the supermarket’s onion bins, and my experiments produced a beautiful range of yellows, greens, and browns. The next color family I wanted to explore was the reds. I knew … More Seeing Red, Getting Green. And Blue
My sister Nancy is a jewelry artist. She has mad OCD technical skills and a brilliant eye for color and design, and luckily for me, she’s very generous to her sisters. She sent me a necklace that she made after she saw photos of my January Swatchathon pieces, the ones made from my plant-dyed yarn, … More Swatchathon Postscript
When I’m on Ravelry, where I see the world’s best knitting and crochet, I fave project after project that were created using skills that are unfamiliar to me, and think “someday”. These last couple of years, I have designated January as that someday. January 2016 was my first swatchathon, and I learned how to crochet and to follow … More January Swatchathon
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 