Leeds Print Workshop

On Friday, we went to the opening party for the Leeds Print Workshop, on Vicar Lane.  Our daughter is one of the founder members, so we've known about it from the very beginning.  A good party - lots of people there, good beer, a tombola (I won a bracelet)...  It was impressive to see how much equipment they have already got, mostly donated.

They are still fund-raising to buy more equipment.  On Friday there was a display  of the prints available as perks to donors.

We have already made a donation, and our perk is the second from the left -- 'In the 50s' by Kirstie Williams.  I love it - it does remind me very much of 1950s furnishing fabric, and the colours are just right.

The first programme of workshops starts this week, running on Saturdays  (including two bookbinding workshops, tutored by our daughter).

 
It's a very impressive start, and I'm sure the Print Workshop will flourish.

A nice article about the workshop, with a photo of the outside of the building, is here.   And just to show that print-making is a messy business, here are some aprons, hanging on the workshop wall.

 

  

A Wedding Dress and Buttons

Lydia and Ash are now back from their honeymoon, so Lydia's knitted wedding dress, which I wrote about last month here,  is now on display in the window of her yarn shop in the Byram Arcade.  There was an article about it in the local paper, the Huddersfield Examiner, with a photo of her wearing it.  I went to the usual Thursday Knit and Natter at the shop this morning and took photos of the dress. 

I wrote in March that I bought some Fimo jewellery from my friend Steph.  She is developing the techniques that she uses all the time, and now produces some wonderfully intricate results.  She brought a new batch of jewellery and buttons to the shop this morning.  A lot of really pretty brooches and earrings, and the buttons were irresistible.

The photo shows just a few of the buttons.  I felt that I should immediately plan lots of knitting - a cardigan with a single large important button, for instance.  It was a hard choice, but in the end I picked the card of two rectangular buttons in the photo.   I might make a collar/cowl/neckwarmer thing - something with two buttons to fasten it.    I'll look for some thick yarn that picks up the colours in the buttons.

 

If you should be in Huddersfield, do go and see Lydia's wedding dress.  And you will find a selection of Steph's Crafty Bits in the shop. 

Fimo jewellery

A few weeks ago, my craft-y friend Steph ran a workshop on making buttons in Fimo modelling clay for the Thursday Knit and Natter group.  She has made a lot more things in Fimo since then.  She bought a pasta machine to help - it makes softening and rolling out the Fimo much easier, and gives more even results.  (Not to be used for making pasta afterwards, though.)  At the Knit and Natter session today, she brought along some jewellery sets that she has made, and I bought the one in the photo.  I love the combination of colours.  Two of the clays she has used are slightly sparkly, and the finished pieces have been glazed.   A long way from plasticine.

Making Buttons

My friend Steph, who is one of the regulars at the Thursday Knit and Natter session at Spun, makes all kinds of craft-y things, including wonderful felted bags, slippers and scarves,  hand-dyed yarn,...  (You can find some of her things on Etsy here.)   A few weeks ago she showed us some buttons that she had made from Fimo.  Fimo is a polymer modelling clay, which is very easy to use - it's suitable for children, and my daughter used to use it a lot.  You can get very good results, though - Steph's buttons are much nicer than the usual plastic ones you can buy.  (And practical - you can machine-wash them, though not put them in the drier.)  Last week, Steph ran a button-making workshop for other members of the Thursday group.   It was a lot of fun, and very sociable too - and we all came home with a collection of buttons that we had made.  

We tried several different techniques during the workshop.  My favourites, I think, are the square-ish buttons with the spiral  patterns in white and beige.   They were made using a kind of Swiss roll technique.  I also like the ones where I mixed two or three colours of Fimo to give a marble effect, and then rolled out the Fimo and used one of Steph's cutters  - I like the combination of the randomness of the colour mixing and the regularity of the shape.   The small oval buttons are striped - Steph has made some very striking striped buttons, with very regular stripes, but mine are much less regular.  Need more practice. 

When I got home, I looked around for the things that my daughter made years ago with Fimo, and found some really intricate millefiori pendants and beads.  I was impressed at the time - now that I have tried it myself, I am even more impressed.

Happy Holidays

Yesterday, a large box arrived through the post from the U.S.,  with our Christmas cards and gifts from our daughter and her girlfriend.  (Slightly late, but never mind - it's nice to get presents over several days.)

Everything was beautifully wrapped in thick paper.  There were:

- several kinds of exotic chocolate (chocolate almond sea salt bark, ...) and some smoked salmon.

- a really useful miniature wind-up torch - I have a little torch on my key ring which was very handy until  it stopped working.

- a book of drawings (bought from an actual artist in an actual art gallery), How to Draw Your Family by Gabriel Liston, with useful advice, like "... once an event occurs you will want to draw it.  While you are drawing it other moments will be happening and you will miss them forever because your eyes were down."    I can't draw, but that certainly happens with photography, if you're not careful .

- and Peter Ackroyd's Venice, which we shall enjoy a lot.  We have been reading about Venice ever since we got back from our holiday - we shall have to go again.

We are very fortunate.
     

Knit, Natter, Have a party

There is a knit-and-natter session every Thursday at the Spun shop in Huddersfield, which opened just over a year ago.   Yesterday, the  knit-and-natter regulars had a Christmas party.     Everyone brought some food  (all excellent), and there were Christmas crackers and mulled wine.   Lydia had made up a goody bag for everyone from the shop, with knitting patterns, some buttons, a magazine, a balloon, ....    And several people had brought hand-made gifts and cards for everyone, which was lovely.     We all got Christmas tree ornaments and a pair of stitch markers (the colour chosen to suit each person, so mine are purple - I do knit quite a lot of purple!)

Good food, good company, and we even did some knitting - it was a really good do.

Dyeing Workshop

On Saturday, I went to a dyeing workshop at Spun, my local yarn shop.  The tutor was Debbie Tomkies, of DT Craft and Design.  It was huge fun - an opportunity to play with colours and messy liquids, with a practical result at the end of it.  I was surprised at how easy and quick the dyes are to use - the only dyeing I have done before involved heating pans of dye on the hob, but on Saturday, we only needed  to microwave the yarn once it had been soaked in the cold dye.    

There were 6 students in the workshop and it was fascinating to see the different ranges of colours that we liked.  I kept to greens, blues and purples, but others used very bright colours, yellows and reds.

Our finished results

I came home with three small skeins of lace-weight wool and a 100g skein of merino and nylon sock yarn.


I dyed one of the lace-weight skeins in a mixture of greens.  I laid out the wet skein on a J-cloth, with a plastic sheet underneath, and squirted the dye directly onto the yarn using a syringe - a satisfyingly reckless process.  Then you pat each section of yarn gently so that the adjacent colours mingle and there are no undyed sections. 

I dyed the other skeins by putting beakers of mixed dye into a big plastic tub. Then you drape the wet yarn over the beakers, so that as much yarn as possible is immersed in dye - the yarn loops into one beaker, then over into the next beaker and so on. [Why didn't I take a photo?]

I dyed  the remaining two lace-weight skeins in purples, blues and greens. I used the same beakers of dye twice, because when the first skein had been dyed, there was still quite a lot of the dye left.  I like the more pastel effect a lot  - I think another time I would use a weaker dye solution in the first place.      

Finally, I dyed the sock yarn using the beaker method with mixtures of red and turquoise dyes, in varying proportions to give a range of purples.   Being a very inexpert dyer, it didn't come out quite as I intended.  I made the dye solution stronger than I intended, again.  And there are some small patches between the different colours where the yarn is sometimes hardly dyed at all, and also some small areas which are pure turquoise with no red at all - maybe I didn't mix the dye thoroughly enough.  But I think that the lighter patches are in the end a good thing - otherwise the overall effect would be too dark.

Even if I envisaged a different end-result, I really like how it has turned out in my knitted sample.  And the yarn is beautifully soft.  I plan to knit a pair of socks with it, and fingerless mittens for me if there is enough left.  




 
It was a really good day - I had fun and learnt a lot. I'll buy some dye from Debbie and try it at home some time (only when I have reduced my stack of half-finished knitting, though).

Rag Rugging

On Saturday I went to a Rag Rugging workshop at Spun, the yarn shop in town.  In fact, we were working on cushion covers rather than rugs and using chunky yarn rather than rags, but the idea was to teach us the techniques so that we can move on to proper rag rugging if we want.

I wanted my cushion to be in dark reds and blues, and designed a kind of heraldic rose.  A rose should have five petals, but I gave it four because the cushion is square,  so it's a quatrefoil, I suppose.

The backing is hessian - when rag rugs were commonly made in this area, I suppose hessian sacks would have been easily available, but now you have to buy it from craft suppliers.  By the end of the workshop, I had finished the outer petals and the centre of the flower, and was trying out a blue for the background.

 
The petals will be finished in a lighter red, and the background will be done in squiggles of two shades of dark blue,  to give an intermediate colour and a livelier effect than using all one shade. (And the loose ends will be trimmed off, of course.)

It is quite a quick technique, and I am pleased with what I have done so far.  It was interesting to see how different the results were around the workshop - ranging from extremely neat and even, like a carpet, to deliberately uneven and shaggy. And the designs were very different, too, of course.

The teacher (Claire Lea) brought in some rags (strips of wool cut from a machine-made jumper) so that we could try them out.  She had brought in one of her rugs to show us, and it was very attractive.  The different fabrics she had used give a lot of variation in texture as well as colour.  It's also a very practical technique - her rug is ten years old and has been used on the floor all that time,  but doesn't look worn.  And it's easy to mend a rag rug just by re-doing any damaged bit.  But I don't think I will abandon knitting for rag-rugging.  I just wanted to try it out, and I think that one cushion will be enough for me. 

I want a Knitting Clock!

I was browsing through the Crafts magazine in the library yesterday when I came across a piece on this clock, designed by Siren Elise Wilhelmsen.

 It is based on a larger version of a French knitting/ Knitting Nancy toy, I think, with 48 prongs instead of the common four.  The clock knits a complete round of 48 stitches every 24 hours, and over the course of a year it produces 2 metres of knitting.  At the end of that time, you change the yarn and start again - each ball of yarn is labelled "Mehr Zeit", or "More time".  And you can use the clock's knitting as a scarf, or else hang it up to symbolise Time Past, I suppose.  Probably not very practical for accurate timing, but isn't it cool?