Things with a soul

I´m still making my granny´s but I decided to post them all at once next week. Instead, I wanted to share my treasure hunt with you!

Yesterday I went to my favorite thriftstore and I found some wonderful things - things with a soul. First I found a necklace and a brooch- the lady in the store told me it belonged to an old lady that passed away. The old lady loved those pretty pieces of jewelery and took such good care of them ... kept every single one of them in tiny little boxes. I feel lucky, that I get to keep on loving them... I love things with a soul and that´s why I like thrifting so much: you can buy things with story of it´s own, a soul.

the necklace, it silver and it seems to be a bloodstone

the brooch, pretty flowers... I´ll use it on sweaters, hats, shawls, dresses.... 

I also found this wonderful stool - it´s really worn out and I wonder who has sat on it, what it has been used for... who it has belonged to through the years and how it got to that thriftstore? I actually saw it 2 weeks ago in a the back of the thriftstore and they didn´t want to sell it then... but yesterday I asked again and nice lady sold it to me! :-) Lucky me! I´m going to do something special with it this weekend and I can´t wait to show you the result!

so many possiblities...

More Granny´s...

Here you have a update on my 2 weeks Granny-project...

Those cuties are my favorite at the moment - I´d love to make them out of different kind of materials (not just yarn...)! They are so much fun to make! You can find the pattern on the Royal sisters blog, they have a really good pattern/tutorial with pictures 

This one is from the Royal sisters blog too - I learned a lot by doing it...

I found the next 4 Granny´s on my favorite "Granny-site"... 

this one was quite fast and easy - you can find it here

... and the next 2 really need to be blocked, but they are really pretty... here

 Have a wonderful week!

Granny´s nr. 3-6

 Update on my "2 weeks Granny program": 

I decided to show you at least 4 Granny´s in one post - and here you go... my Granny´s nr. 3, 4, 5 and 6...           

(please click on the name to get to the pattern)

nr. 3 (huge): squaring the big sircle

 

Nr. 4 (huge): Dúllur Veru (from the book Prjónaperlur)

Nr. 5 (smaller than nr. 3&4): Sunburst Granny heart

Nr. 6 (small and cute, so much fun to make!): Daisy Granny

And here you have a small taste of wonderful, sunny summerday in Reykjavík...

 

Granny nr. 2 and 2b

You can read all about my challenge: "A Granny a day for 2 weeks" here. 

Granny´s nr. 2 and 2b are ready but not blocked... 

Pattern: crochet square tutorial, found here

yarn: kambgarn and léttlopi

Pattern: square - a chart found here

yarn: einband

Yarn bombing in Reykjavík

Since I´m extremely busy working on a certain knitting project I haven´t got much time for any other knitting or crochet-related things. But when I was invited to take part in a yarn bombing-thing in Reykjavík I was really tempted - especially when I looked into the big box of yarn (sponsored by Istex for the yarn bombing) filled with different kind of icelandic wool in every colour of the rainbow! You can read all about it in icelandic here.

After thinking a lot about what I could knit or crochet, that didn´t take to much time and was in some way interesting and challenging, I decided to make a 2 weeks program: I´m going use this as an opportunity to learn how to make different kind of crochet squares and make a square a day for at least 2 weeks.

There are two rules:
1. Never make the same square more than once
2. Every square has to be one, that I´ve never made before

It only takes about 5-30 min to learn how to make a new square and I really can spare those few minutes of my time for this fun project.

I´m really excited about this challenge - I'm going to learn how to make at least 14 different kind of crochet squares and it will only take about 10 minutes a day! :-)The fun thing is, the squares don´t have to look perfect, so even if I make a mistake it doesn´t matter at all  - and I also get to use colours I would normally never choose for granny squares (at the moment: dalia hot pink, bright yellow, turquoise... )


If you want to participate in my challenge and make a granny a day for 2 weeks, please leave a link to your blog, photosite or ravelry-page...

Details on square 1:

Yarn: léttlopi, einband and kambgarn

hook: 4,5

Pattern: French Nannie Granny Flower Square, found here on Ravelry (tutorial and pattern with pictures)

The very cute front: 

I´ve always wanted to know how to make a flower in a square - and now I do! 

The back:

natural dyed wooden beads

I´ve seen people write about their experience with dyeing wooden beads (ólakkaðar og ómálaðar tréperlur) with natural dyes, on different blogs. Inspired by those blogs and some pictures on Pinterest I decided to give it a try!

I got some wooden, undyed beads (Litir og Föndur, Skólavörðustíg) and let them cook together with some wool in Alum - I don´t know if it makes any sense using Alum... but I did it anyway! :-)

I then tryed out the following dyestuff:
1. Curcuma (Túrmerik)
2. The liquid from pickled Red beetroot
3. Grounded chili and paprika
4. Cranberry Apple Zinger Tea from Celestial Seasonings
5. Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea

How I did it:
I poured boiling water over the dyestuff in different jars. I put the jars out in the sun on my balcony and let the beads soak in the liquids for 2 days and 1 night - I occasionally shook the jars a little bit.

Result:
I was really amazed and at the same time disapointed by the result - only 2 of the things above gave some colour:

1. Curcuma: great result; wonderful, mustard-yellow
2. Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea: an interesting purple-brownish... I kind of like it...

I expected that the beetroots would give the best bead-dye (pink) - but I was really surprised and disapointed that my wooden beads didn´s soak in any colour at all! I wasn´t really expecting much of the chili/paprika-blend and the Zinger Tea...

Other natural bead-dyes I tryed out: 
I also tryed boiling the beads together with some wool with different plants that normally give you a strong colour like rhubarb-leaves, madder root, red and yellow onionskins - but none of those things worked out as a bead-dye (no colour at all).

Now I´m wondering:
1. Can you think of any other possible well-working bead-dye-material I could try out?
2. Should I try getting a different kind of  undyed wooden beads in another store?

Me and my older son love the result - we now fight over who get´s to wear them... I´ll have to let him make his own... ;-)

Curcuma-beads... yummi, love them!

Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea-beads - nice...

My roots

It has been a dream of mine for some time now, to dye with rhubarb-roots (rabbarbararót). It´s not easy to get this dyematerial, so that beeing able to make a strong dye from those roots has only been a dream of mine... until last friday! The thing is, that day my cousin G. called and told me he knows somebody who is getting rid of rhubarb in their garden and if I wanted to and could go there right away, I could get some rhubarb-roots. 

I drove like a mad person to Garðarbær and was expecting to get 1-2 roots... but never in my dreams did I imagine that I would drive back home with 2 big garbage bags, filled with roots! Wow... what an amount of roots... and how much beautiful colors could I possibly get out of this dyematerial!! 

Now I just have a really tiny problem: how to dry this amount of roots without filling up every empty space in our really small 3-room flat? We´ll see... wo der Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg... 

Thanky you so much cousin G. - you made me really happy and I can´t wait to make a strong rhubarb-roots-dye! 

 A huge root... gigantic!

shades, texture, sweet smell...

  cutting the roots so that they´ll dry faster and better

beautiful from the inside... 

 

so much dye-material - love it! 

Another thing I wanted to share with you are 2 dyeing-experiments I did the other day:

I dyed some kambgarn (wool) with the roots of Rumex acetosella (hundasúra). I had read on the internet, that it should give you pink or grey color.  I used Alum and then dyed with the roots, and got a pretty brown colour out of it. Even if I washed it out with a small amount of salmiak spiritus, it only got a slightly different brown shade. It´s quite similar to the brown colour you get from coffee - and coffee is so much easier to get than those small and tiny roots, so I would prefer coffee to get this brown shade. 

kambgarn dyed with the roots of Rumex acetosella

The other thing I did, was dyeing einband and kambgarn (wool) with horse-tail. I had read that it should give you a pink or a grey shade - but the only color I got was a pretty, even yellow.  Well, yellow was not the color I was expecting and aiming for - so hoping for a miracle, I tryed dyeing it again with Rumex acetosella (the leaves and flowers), since I had heard it should give you a green tone. And once again, I just got a deeper yellow... really anoyed I threw the wool into water mixed up with salmiak spiritus - and the color I got from that was just wonderful: a golden mustard but really the most pretty one I´ve ever gotten! 

I DO love this golden mustard