When I Grow Up...

Today is my birthday, and guess what I want to be when I grow up... A chihuahua!
I think my little Valentine's got the perfect life, napping next to me, cozy on my knitting...

Birthday Collection

This week is a special week. I am turning 40! I decided to celebrate and create a collection of my favorite colors. I created them using natural dyes. Indigo, osage orange and cochineal were my inspirational companions this week. I chose favorite deserts, favorite places, favorite trees, parks, and of course my all time favorite color: orange! Creating these colorways was the loveliest birthday present I could ever give myself!
I hope you will enjoy the Birthday Collection.

It is Open Studios this weekend

SockPixie is busy with Open Studios this weekend. And I am having great fun meeting art and fiber lovers here in Boston.The next color update will be on Tuesday September 29.
Have a great Sunday!

Still Natural!

This week, like last week, I continued to explore natural dyes. This time, walnuts, henna, annatto, and indigo were my companions. The walnuts gave me hours of fun! I love how they can give a myriad of brown shades, each one richer or subtler then the next. The annatto brought sunlight in my week. The yellows it produces range from a deep punpkin to a soft buttercup. They are so sunny! The henna gave me caramel tones so juicy it made me want to eat crem caramel all day! And there was the indigo. Now it was my first time doing indigo vat dyeing, and I loved it. It was a slow meditative process. I immersed the fibers slowly so as not to introduce any oxygen in the vat numerous times to reach the blue of my dreams. I will definitely explore indigo again. The vats are waiting in my studio as we speak.
Here is the Natural Collection:




I was so in love with the richness of this week's colorways that I started knitting argyle socks using the colors Dark Chocolate, Sand, and Pumpkin Pie. I will be doing my lines with a duplicate stitch but have not chosen the color.
The natural colors are glorious, and blend so well together. I love their subtle shadings. I find myself seating late at night promising myself and my husband that I will just knit one more row. But after that one more row, comes another and another...

Hollyhock

Do you have a favorite flower? Well I do, and it is the hollyhock. It has not always been though. It used to be the tulip, but lasty year, in the spring, I planted some hollyhock seeds. The pictures on the seed packets looked beautiful, but the first year as is often the case the plants barely grew. Then this summer, they started growing, and buds started appearing. Every time I walked outside the door, I would check on their progress. And finally they bloomed, one flower at a time. The blooms were so beautiful, all plump and ruffled, and so vibrantly colored.
I had to few hollyhocks to create a dye out of them, but I still wanted to capture the rich reds, so I used cocheneal instead, and created Hollyhock.
There is a little more to it though. To give it this incredible depth, I first dyed it with Alkanet which gave it a grey tone, and then overdyed it with cochineal. That was a lengthy process, but the result was worth it!
Every time I use natural dyes, I am in awe of the intensity and depth of the colors, as well as their range. They definitely require so much more work, and patience than chemical dyes, but working with them is always rewarding. The results definitely are, don't you think?

It is all natural!

This week is my first Collection since the end of my holidays. As you know, I went to Bar Harbor, Maine. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the area, by nature. All this natural beauty made me want to use natural dyes to create a special collection. All the yarns this week are dyed using the bark of Alkanet, or sandalwood, and the reds and pink were created with cochineal.
I hope that you will enjoy the Natural Collection.