"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."- Leonardo da Vinci

6.06.2015

When knitters get together

As you know, I am a mom. A mom of 2, whose son is quite the sporty type. We have soccer, swimming, hockey, power-skating lessons... it busy, very busy. And as my daughter grows, it's only going to get worse. So finding a day when my schedule is clear is no easy feat. But it worked, for myself and my knitterly friends. We all cleared a Saturday, and gathered at Lilian's place for an afternoon of ....yarn-dyeing.

Lily and I took a workshop together a few years ago, and since then we've been hooked. And sadly enough it's taken us this long to get organized and meet to do it again. This time around however we wanted to try something a little different. Instead of acid dyes we used natural, plant-based ones. 

We had tea, onion peel, pomegranate, turmeric and cabbage. These were not our snacks, but our dyes. It was fascinating to see everyone's imagination take flight and experiments turn out. 

My inspiration came from a few evenings before, when I was having snack and tried to sneak in a few paragraphs from one of my favourite books. The colour I was hoping for is  a pastel yellow-pink-orange colour, and as you can see, it turned out pretty well. I used a combination of pomegranate dye, and onion peel.

It was so much fun! I came home with my mind buzzing with ideas, and thoughts and questions... I looked up articles and plants, and I am going to try this again. For sure! As soon as I can clear my schedule again! Hopefully it will be sooner then a couple of years from now.







As a side note, red cabbage is not a good choice... I guess there is a reason it does not come up as an example when researching natural yarn dyeing. It smells...

3 comments:

  1. Oh Monica, you are inspiring me. I've been dreaming of growing a natural dye garden and doing this once in a while, for fun. I adore the outcome of your pomegranate and onion dye! I'm going to make note of that for one of these days...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your yarn came out nice - love the color of it. It was a fun day surrounded by good friends, lots of laughter. Let's try to make it an annual thing!

    ReplyDelete