I love rhubarb...

I love rhubarb... everything about it, the taste, the colour... you can eat it, cook it, bake it and the best thing is: you can dye with every single part of it - from root to top! :-) This week I´ve been very busy cooking and dyeing with the rhubarb, my friend gave me the other day. I made jam, a cake and of course: I did some yarn-dyeing with it!!!

When you are dyeing with plants, it´s always fascinating to see, how different 2 skeins yarn can turn out, coming from the same pot. I dyed about 7 skeins of yarn, and almost none of them is exactly the same. Some of them have some brownish-red spots (skellur), some of them are much darker and others a bit lighter in colour. But exactly that´s the fascinating part of the yarndyeing, you never know what you´re going to get! And most of the time, you don´t get what you expect!

Again I must say, the pictures don´t really show the beauty of the colours - but if you click on the pictures you can see them in full size:

the wool

on my balcony, preparing for the winter:

Rhubarb-jam
cake with rhubarb (hjónabandssæla), recipe from my grandmother

A really good day

I finished a new, very simple shawl yesterday called "vinkonusjal" (Fleiri Prjónaperlur). It´s the second time I knit this one and I really like the pattern - it´s so easy, quick and so very different every time, depending on the yarn and needles you use. This time I used the soft, icelandic "kambgarn" and needles 3,5. The piece is really small and cute- it´s more like a bactus or a shawl for a little girl.






I also have to tell you, that today was a really good day. It all started with a cup of coffee with a very dear friend, who sent me home with a black garbagebag filled with rhubarb for my yarn-dyeing... but I´ll probably make sume rhubarb-jam, pie and some other things with it too, since it really is a lot! She also gave me a small owl for my collection and some owl-napkins which I love:

On my way home, I stopped at a thriftstore and got a really beautiful retro-oil-lamp, a HUGE pot for my yarndyeing (my biggest one so far) and a candle-holder which I´m going to use for special project I´ll show you later... I just couldn´t believe my luck:

Not what it looks like

Yesterday I tryed something new. If you look at this picture...

... you might think it has something to do with beans and food?? But actually it has nothing to do with food at all!! Those are green things on the picture are seed-pods of Lupina-flowers. I wanted to find out, what happens if you dye wool with them. I was not surprised at all, when the wool became yellow - it is a very mild, light but of course: natural colour. I like it and it is quite easy to get because we have so much Lupina in Iceland :-)

If you click on the pictures, you can see them bigger and you can see
the colours much better:

Another experiment I made was dyeing with the root of the Lupina-flower. It was a very time-consuming process to get colour from the roots but I wasn´t really expecting anything else. The colour is a very light brown-yellowish, it´s nice but I don´t think it´s worth the effort since it´s not always easy to dig out the roots. But it was very interesting like always. Thanks to "Hespa", who gave me some really good tips on facebook, the colour became a bit stronger.

Saffran-dyeing

A few weeks ago, Rodprjonar and G. gave me some Saffran they bought in Spain, because they really wanted to now if it was possible to dye yarn with it. I was really happy with this gift, and excited to see the result of the dyeing. I used mordant and then I cooked the yarn with the saffran. You wouldn´t believe how very yellow the yarn turned out :-) The colour reminds me of easter, IKEA and the swedish flag! I really like the colour and I LOVE the fact, that the wool smells like saffran!

The saffran starting to cook, not looking very impressiv

wool and mordant

wool and saffran united

Wool and saffran united - a closeup

rinsing the wool

Aeolian Knit-Along - done

I finally finished our (Rodprjonar and Gummi) “little-knit-along” Aeolian-shawl. One of the practical things about our Knit-Along was that everytime one of us had a problem we could ask the other 2 people who where working on the same project for advice. It was also very exciting to see, how different one pattern can turn out, depending on the knitter and the yarn. It was so much fun doing this, and I hope we´ll repeat this with another project in the future. Rodprjonar was the first to finish his really beautiful shawl - you can see that here.

Details on mine:

Pattern: Aeolian shawl size, wide edge

Yarn: einband, colours: my own (2 different kind of lichen; brúnir tónar: skófir; guli: hreindýramosi)

Needles: 3.5 mm

- Began knitting with a 2 stitches garter stitch tab on a provisional crochet cast on.
- 7 loops nupps

Me and Gummi made:
- 12 repeats of the Yucca chart (R. made 6).
- 2 repeats of the Agave chart (R. made none).
- 1 repeat of the final Agave chart (R. made 1).
- 1 repeat of the edge chart (R. made 1).

My shawl is really HUGE – I couldn´t believe how huge it was when the blocking was done!! But I LOVE exactly that about it and everything else too – the colours, the pattern and the fact that it was made in our own little knit-along! I also couldn´t agree more with Rodprjonar when he says on his blog: "The transitions between section look amazingly pretty and in harmony and the edge is breathtaking".
I can´t wait meet G. and R. to see with my own eyes how there shawls look like!!

CafeSigrun

CafeSigrun.com is a blog full of healthy and great recipes. Ever since I read this post from Barbietec I´ve been wanting to make "orkuhnullungar". For those of you, who can´t read icelandic, this is not interesting, since the recipe is in icelandic :-( Sorry about that! I didn´t have all those healthy organic things you are supposed to use, and instead I just used what I had at home. But I´m sure those cookies would taste even better if you only use everything super-healthy and organic... I only used dates (döðlur) and no raisins - but I´ll probably use both next time. I didn´t have enough sesame-seeds, so I added a bit of sunflower seeds (I roasted the seeds together with the nuts in a pan) . I also used the double amount of cinnamon. I really like the result - they have a strong, special taste of the roasted seeds and nuts, a mild taste of chocolate and the spices... I´m sure those are going to become a favorite of mine and I´m going to keep on experimenting with the recipe.

Our own little Aeolian Knit-Along

The other day, when knitting with Rodprjonar and G. we were talking about how we all wanted to knit the Aeolian-shawl - and that´s when we decided to make our own little Aeolian-knit-along. The interesting thing about our knit-along is to see how different one shawl can look, depending on the yarn, implementation and knitter! I just can´t wait to see how R. and G. shawls look like! Here you can see Rodprjonars version.
So far, I´ve learned a lot by knitting this piece - for example nupps... they look really pretty but I hate making them... knitting those 7 stiches together is so hard to do!
I´m using my own hand-dyed yarn in 2 brown shades for the main-charts and 1 yellow/brownish shade for the edge-chart (dyed with 2 different types of lichen). I love the way the colours look - they are quite uneven and alive... really hard to describe and you can´t really caputure them on pictures. (If you click on the pictures, you can see them fullsize)