Mousie

My little niece had birthday earlier this month. I decided she should have a cute little mousie of her own and that this would be the perfect opportunity to finally knit Ysolda Teague´s Mousie from the book Whimsical Little Knits (you can also buy the pattern online here).  

This was the first time I knit a toy and it was surprisingly fun. The pattern starts with the tail/Icord and is knitted in the round, ending with the tip of his nose. I used léttlopi for this one and the pink yarn used for the tail, ears and nose is dyed with madder root.  This irresistible little mousie is not only really really cute, but also an extremely quick knit...

  

  

And just because I was having so much fun with my new lens... 

Crochet snowflakes and christmas in my heart

These little crochet decorations simply make me happy - I´m so glad I learned how to crochet this year! :-)

Snowflake from the book "Þóra"

Crochet hearts, the one in the front is from the book "Þóra" and the one in the back is a free tutorial, found here

I really loved making Lucy´s (attic24) snowflakes - they are so easy to make, quick and really really pretty! I just couldn´t stop making them and had to try out other materials than cotton... bulky lopi, léttlopi and einband (jurtalitað), which I dyed myself with dandelions and Rumex longifolius (njóli)

Since the light was so poor last week (it´s dark most of the time at the moment) I wasn´t able to take any pictures (word of the week). This shot is in a way a little something to compensate for that. Last weeks task was to choose a little spot (a room, a corner of your garden, balcony... ) and look for something interesting to take pictures of.
I went right outside my front door and tried to find something interesting there - not an easy task - but since I love moss, this little spot, covered with green moss is really interesting in my eyes...

Kría

I think crochet-projects like shawls, collars and squares make the most perfect on-the-go-projects. It´s just one hook, one strand of yarn and you can easily choose a pattern that´s just a constant repetition... you can therefore easally work without counting and making mistakes all the time AND it fits into most handbags. 

Because of this, I started making my first crochet shawl during a campingtrip this summer. It´s the wonderful pattern "Kría" from the beautiful book "Þóra heklbók" by Tinna Þórudóttir Þorvaldsdóttir.
Making this shawl is totally addicting - once you´ve started, you can´t stop and now that I´ve finished one, I can´t wait to make another one in different colours!! Crazy! What I really like about this shawl is, that I was able to use my leftover-natural-dyed-yarn... it´s so hard to find use for leftover einband (lace)... and the strange thing is, that no matter how many colours you use for this project, it will always look nice (that´s not the case for knitted lace shawls).
I added a scalloped edging (5dc each) and I´m so glad I did - it makes it even more pretty!

My new shawl reminds me this wonderful summer I had with my boys, all the fun campingtrips, nature and sun... thanks to all those memories and the warmth of the colours it will keep me and my soul warm on cold, dark winterdays.

Details: 
Yarn: icelandic einband (lace), dyed by myself with many different plants
Hook: 3,5
Repeats: 62 since I like bigger shawls 
Modifications: I added a edging
Resumé: love this pattern, love this book!

amazing and surprising how the combination of many different colours really works for this shawl

love the size...

so warm and cozy!

love those colours... 

scalloped edging

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