Summer Colours

Summer Colours, what lovely words! Goes with Summer Holidays, ice cream, cream teas and happy days! I have really been indulging my love of colour recently with a new crochet project, a natural dyeing workshop and finding a shawl I just lurve to wear in the summer.

You may have read my blog of 11 May, “What’s Your Favorite Colour” and realised that I love colour, and in the lovely sunny weather, the brighter the colour the better! My new crochet project makes the most of the lovely colour range from Nurturing Fibres Eco Cottons which are all hand dyed in South Africa in a community Fair Trade project. The Pattern I’m using is from Inside Crochet, issue 66, a pattern for a Hexagons blanket by Nicki Trench. I’ve gone for a more seaside colour palette, less tropical than her choice, which do you prefer? I’m really enjoying these little hexagons, they are quick to make, and quite addictive, “oh, just one more”….

 

Summer Colours and Natural Dyes

The Summer Colours we created on the natural dyeing workshop were gorgeous! We used golden gorse flowers (very typical of a Cornish summer day), Lichen, Onion skins, Madder and Logwood, with a few cochineal beetles for an amazing red. Wool skeins were prepared, then soaked in the hot dyes to allow the summer colours to infuse the fibres. It was like alchemy! The colours we created were then modified by bathing the skeins again in various acid or alkali dips and we created a rainbow of beautiful, gentle summer colours. Here they all are dying on the line at home, and being wound off into balls, ready for use…

We had to wear gloves throughout the process so we didn’t end up with yellow, red or purple hands, but look at the opening photo…. It’s not one I have taken, but I just love it! The colours of blue this artisan has dyed those yarns are beautiful, and his hands show the evidence. I wouldn’t mind being caught blue handed like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have plans to make a crochet blanket with them, graduating the colour from golden lichen yellow through gorse and mustard onion skin to peach and brick red madder and through to logwood purples. Each ball is about 25g, so the blanket will be a bit like the Advent blanket I crocheted in the days before Christmas, 25g per day. That will be really something to look forward to, especially as its likely to be the autumn before I get time, so I will be able to enjoy those lovely summer colours all over again. (The bowl the yarn is pictured in is by Roger Hills, Wood Turner, I mentioned him in a blog in march. He’s on Facebook if you fancy contacting him to order a bowl, they are beautifully hand made, everyone is unique and special.)

 

 

 

 

Summer Colour shawl

So here’s the shawl, remember me making it last summer?

Now that’s a summer colour if ever there was!

Do you have any projects on the go for this summer? What summer colours do you really like? Gorgeous Yarns have a great range of cottons and bamboo, perfect to keep you cool as the weather gets warmer.

 

Bye for now,

Caroline