Favourite thing on a Friday - logwood purple

My favourite thing this Friday has to be logwood purple.  I have been dyeing with logwood this week.  The dye comes from a tropical tree, it arrives as fine chips of wood.  I extract the dye from the chips, strain off the chips and then dye the yarn.  It is a slow process.  However the colours are amazing.  You can get a dark purple:

Or paler shades of lavender:

The camera struggles to pick up purples accurately, the colours look more blue in the photos. 

This week I make a strong dye bath and dyed a batch of purple yarns.  The next day I wanted to use the same dye bath to get lavender shades.  I lifted the lid on the dye pan and saw the liquid was no longer a lovely purple .  The dye bath had turned a nasty browny yellow - arrrgh.  Since this has happened before I knew what to do.  It annoys me that books on natural dyeing do not always warn you this can happen.  Last time I dyed with logwood and got a ghastly colour I did some frantic internet research and discovered logwood is affected by the pH value of the water.  To get lovely purples you need an alkaline pH. 

I don't understand the science but somehow how my dye bath had changed pH and was now pH5, acidic.  I dissolved some washing soda in hot water and added it to the dye bath.  Instantly the water turned purple!  I put the yarn in the dye bath but I had to add more soda as the water started going yellow again.  It is better to add small amounts of soda and keep testing the pH value until it is correct.  Of course wool is not fond of an alkali solution so it is important not to let the dye bath become too alkali.  I find pH9 gives a good colour.

The yarns I have dyed this week will be on sale at The Big Knit Show this Sunday.  There are also some yarns dyed with logwood available in my shop.

Now do go and see what everyone else has chosen for their Favourite Thing on a Friday!

Yarns I couldn't resist

I did promise to show you what  I bought at the East Sussex Guild of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers Exhibition.  Here are the gorgeous yarns I couldn't resist.

First Schoppel Wolle Crazy Zauberball:

 100g, 420m, 75%wool, 25% nylon sock yarn

 I adore the colours.  Then I saw a ball of Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic:

 100g, 400m, 75% wool, 25% nylon, sock yarn

 The funny thing was, when I saw the Crazy Zauberball, I couldn't help exclaiming  how gorgeous the colours were. A complete stranger stood next to me said 'Oh then you must have it.'  So I did!  I bought both yarns from High Weald Fibre Factory. I would link to their site but the site appears to be down at the moment.

Now, what do you think I ought to make with these new yarns?  I have one 100g ball of each.

 

Favourite things on a Friday

I thought I'd join in with Emma's Favourite Things on a Friday.  My Favourite thing today is the East Sussex Guild of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers Exhibition. 

I have just got back.  What can I say.  A perfect day.  Ooodles of yarns, fibre, colours and lovely things people have made.  I have of course spent far too much money but never mind, it was worth it.  There is no natural light now and I am pushed for time so I have no photos of what I bought but I will show you another day.  The exhibition is on tomorrow as well so if you live any where near Lewes, East Sussex, UK, I highly recommend you go along. 

Now do visit Emma's blog and read all about Favourite Things on a Friday.

More Sheep in Literature

I recently confessed to a passion for poetry as well as sheep.  I'm always excited when the two combine and I come across a poem about sheep.  One of my favourite sheep poems is from Ted Hughes' Season Songs.  Unsurprisingly, the poem is entitled 'Sheep' and describes in detail the shearing process.  Hughes writes from the point of view of the sheep.  It is a sensitive, insightful poem:

Why am I dragged into the light and whirled onto my back

Why am I sat up on my rear end with my legs splayed

A man grips me helpless
What is that buzzer what is it coming
Buzzing like a big fierce insect on a long tangling of snake
What is this man doing to me with his buzzing thing.

I often wonder what the sheep is thinking.  When I did my shearing course we were shearing older ewes.  The farm hosts the course each year so the chances are the ewes get shorn by beginners several years running.  I'm sure the older sheep knew what to expect because some of them just lay there quietly, as though they were thinking 'here we go again'.  

In Hughes' poem, the sheep comes off the winner:

She trots away, noble-nosed, her pride unsmirched.
Her greasy winter-weight stays coiled on the foul floor, for somebody else to bother about.
She has a beautiful wet green brand on her bobbing brand-new backside,
She baas, she has come off best.

What do you think of Hughes' poem?  Do you think sheep remember being shorn?

Cover Girl

I have never aspired to be a cover girl.  However, if I were to dare dream of such a thing, I would imagine myself being photographed only after several hours with a very large team of professional beautifiers and then being thoroughly air brushed.  This week I had a shock.  I find I am a cover girl.  Photographed not after a makeover but after having been bent over a sheep for the last twenty minutes!

The September/October issue of Yarnmaker is out any day now and the cover image has been released.  This issue contains my second article on learning to shear where I recorded my experiences of a sheep shearing course I took in the summer.  I just didn’t expect to be on the cover.  Dirty, sweaty and jubilant, hugging the fleece I had just shorn (no, I'm not the one with four horns). 

 Thanks Dot!

Yarnmaker, started by Dorothy Lumb (Dot) in August 2010, is a magazine aimed at handspinners and people who are passionate about fibre.  Single issues and subscriptions are available from the Yarnmaker website.

Sheep in Literature

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately, life has got in the way.  Also I haven’t had much to report compared to the busy shearing and craft show season.  I’m still plodding away with the mohair, there’s a bit more to comb before I can start spinning but once I get on to the spinning I’ll post an update.  

In the meantime, I thought I’d share another of my passions with you.  As well as being somewhat crazy about sheep, I also like literature.  I get very excited when the two interests come together and I actually find a piece about sheep.  This doesn’t happen all that often.  Recently I’ve been reading the works of WH Davies.  Davies had an amazing life, he was a tramp for many years.  In 1893 he went to America and in the following years he worked his passage across the Atlantic many times.  

The ships he worked on carried cattle and sheep.  Davies speaks briefly about the sheep in his book The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, he describes sailing with 2000 sheep on board.  The crossings seemed to take about 13 days.  I find it incredible that they used to ship live sheep across the Atlantic from America for slaughter in England.  The losses were considerable, with Davies giving an account of one voyage where all of the sheep were washed overboard during a storm.  

Undoubtedly Davies’ most powerful accounts of sailing with sheep are found in his two poems ‘A Child’s Pet’ and ‘Sheep’.  ‘Sheep’ describes the animals’ distress at leaving land behind:

They sniffed, poor things, for their green fields,

They cried so loud I could not sleep:

‘A Child’s Pet’ is a heart wrenching account of a sheep which had probably been a bottle fed lamb:

Yet every night and every day one sheep

That had no fear of man or sea,

Stuck through the bars its pleading face,

And it was stroked by me.

Davies describes the men on the ship as a bunch of ruffians and thieves yet all of them make a fuss of the tame sheep: 

Eight ragged sheep-men – tramps and thieves –

Would stroke that sheep’s black nose.

Sheep are often overlooked, I love the way Davies empathises with the sheep and really makes the tame sheep live in my imagination.

What do you think?  Have you come across any sheep in literature? 

Processing raw mohair by hand

An angora goat and her kid

At the moment I am busy processing some mohair.  Mohair is the fibre which comes from the angora goat.  This can be confusing since there are angora rabbits and angora goats, the fibre from angora rabbits is referred to as angora whereas the fibre produced by angora goats is known as mohair.  

I saw the flock of goats shorn and I picked what I considered to be the best kid fleeces.  By kid I mean the goats were about a year old and this was their first shearing, they weren’t tiny kids but this will be the best fleece of their lives.  I need to produce about 800g of finished yarn for the owner of the goats.  This is a massive job.  I don’t know of any easy way of preparing mohair fibre.

The raw mohair

 First of all I washed the mohair with Unicorn Power Scour, it was very dirty and smelt terrible while wet!

Now the mohair is dry I am combing through one lock at a time with a pet brush.  The locks open up easily except at the butt end, the end where the fibre was shorn from the goat.  The underside of the fleeces are heavily matted and in places scurfy. 

I don’t know much about this scurf, I’ve heard various explanations, some people say it is hardened wax but I think it is dry skin, a kind of goat dandruff.  It doesn’t dissolve in water which I would expect it to if it was grease.  It is gritty in texture.  I have heard that dry skin is a breeding fault or a lack of oil in the diet, who knows.  All I know is I have my work cut out producing 800g of ready to spin mohair!  I must say, despite the scurf, the fibre is beautiful, soft and luminous.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Have you ever worked with raw mohair?  How did you prepare the fibre for spinning?