Dyeing the Yarn, Evendoon by Kate Davies Complete! - Fleece & Harmony Knitting Podcast Ep.81

[Music] hello everybody it's kim from fleece and harmony thanks for joining me for the knitting podcast recorded here in our shop in our woolen mill on our sheep farm in belfast prince edward island i hope everybody is doing great today um welcome to anybody that's new and this is maybe your first time watching and for everybody else that's joined us in the past then thanks for coming back again today so you're looking at this on october 1st if you're looking at it on the day that it is published as always i'm recording a couple days earlier it's episode 81 it's hard to believe 81 it's amazing and we're going to have the regular lineup today we're going to talk about a farm update which is really about a house renault update and i have an fo which i'm going to talk about a little bit more i have a whip and no rips this time so we have a couple whips that i'm going to show shop update as always and then we're going to do a little fiber festival update and there'll be an in the mill section and this is on dyeing yarn this time so we're going to go back into the die room and we'll have the harmony part at the end and i'll just do a little explanation before we actually start the recording that we did for the harmony part so without further ado we'll get started on the farm update so we have moved just this morning the sheep into kind of their winter paddock i guess is what we call it so they haven't eaten there all summer because they've been out in a huge big field that we have that's like around the shop and so they've pretty well chewed that down to to what's uh what's there's not much left let's put it that way and so we move them to where we keep them in the winter so they have access to the barn we just leave they're outside most of the time but they do have access to the barn if they if their weather is really bad and they just come and go as you play we play they please we leave the wind or the doors open so they can just come and go and they have quite a large feel to roam around in and they haven't eaten there all summer so the grass is really high and well there's a lot of clover in it too so they love clover so they're chewing and munching away all day today so they're pretty pretty content where they are and uh it's funny they just seem to know where they're going that kind of i guess the changing of the season and they know kind of what the routine is so they just went went right over there and within five minutes it was like that's where they've been all summer so it's uh it's great uh they're all set for the winter now and the other thing that's happening on the farm is for those of you that don't know we live in a 160 year old farm house and it's been it's had a little bit of work done to it in the past but not that much so it's pretty much original and we're now being forced to start doing some some work on it because we had a root a leak in the roof we had this wild windstorm and rainstorm and the rain was coming from a different direction than it normally comes and was just pelting the house like crazy and we discovered that there was a leak over one of the windows so we knew that there might have been something going on there because the house has some of the plaster has been replaced with gyprock but there's still a lot of the original plaster that is starting to crack actually which is kind of understandable with 160 year old house and so we knew that there was uh some water getting in because we could see that there was dampness on the i guess it would be like the skim coat on the plaster was starting to lift a little bit in some places and with this crazy windstorm that we had we actually had a leak right in our living room so we had to do a little bit of work on on that so luckily uh we had we have a guy big jay who's coming he did come and did the work so he was awesome and we're just finishing up on that but of course it's the you know your heart always stops when you have to pull something down in an old house because you don't want to even know probably what's in behind some of these old walls and stuff but we were pretty lucky it was very isolated and easy to get to there's flat roofs roofs over some of the windows that are that are on the house which flat roofs are a nightmare especially in damp and rainy where it's raining a lot and um so that's where it was the water was settling on on one of the flat roofs so he had to re-shingle it actually so it's just a small project it was very isolated so it really is two days and it was uh it was all torn out and then redone so that's a bit of excitement that we didn't expect for the for the farm so the house needs quite a lot of work and we just haven't really decided what we want to do with it and everything so we're just getting to the point where we're really starting to think about what has to be done but this nature called the shots on this this particular little repair we had to do we had to do it right away because we probably will get more rain and certainly when the snow starts here in the fall it stops it starts but it's quite wet and it'll rain one day and snow the next day so all of the snow would be sitting on the top of that roof and we were probably just going to ask for trouble if we didn't uh handle that right away so that's been done and he just has to come and smooth the the mud on the on the gyprock because of course it was replaced with gyprock because we're not going to plaster again and then we'll have to a little bit of painting to do and and we'll be set for for winter hopefully we also had our wood delivered so we have a wood burning furnace in our house and we have a big wood lot about 22 acres i guess of wood so we had wood delivered we don't cut it the wood ourselves another guy cuts it and we had some wood from our own woodlot a couple years ago but now he's we're managing the wood lot i would say so he had cut he had cut wood from uh part of the wood that was overgrown and everything so that uh it's to regen regenerate the the wood lot so he brought us wood now from uh some another wood lot close by so we have lots of hardwood to burn in our furnace and we also have wood stoves in the house as well so we use a wood stove and we the wood furnace to heat most of the time we don't use a lot of oil like a tank of oil lasts us two and a half years or so because we just we'd really just use the oil if we just need a quick a quick shot so um so that's pretty good we love it when the wood arrives because it means that we're going to be cozy in the winter as long as the wind's not blowing too too hard through the cracks and the you know the poorly insulated 160 older farmhouse which makes it great for sweaters because you have to wear sweaters all the time so that's about all that's happened on the farm the sheep are in their new place for the winter and we've got a new roof over one of the flat roofs over a window and we've started our house renovations before we thought we would have to but it's all it's all good and we were really lucky because when he opened up the old plaster it could have been a lot worse obviously but it was not too bad it was very clear where the leak was and very isolated so it was kind of kind of a quick fix and i'm very thankful for that so i think we can just talk about an fo now first time in a while that it's my own fo and it's my even dune sweater is finished and literally it was just finished this morning because i sewed in all the ends this morning so it's not even blocked i didn't dare block it because i didn't think that it might it would probably not have been dry to put on for recording so it's not blocked so it's not exactly you can still see kind of the little bumps that that all come out when you uh when you block something so i'm looking forward to doing that i'll probably uh soak it first thing tomorrow morning and put it put printed out to dry so the last episode if you watched the last episode i had a bit of a problem because i had run out of the selkirk it in watermelon which is the color of these reddish pink stripes so this is how much yarn i had left and i had left a cliffhanger in the last episode because i wasn't sure what i was going to do because i had one more stripe to do of this color on the the right hand or the right arm the sleeve and i obviously could have gotten more yarn and finished it with the with the red stripe but i decided i would try to be creative because if that happens to you guys when you're knitting um there's there's usually something that you can do if you have a little bit of a stash or if you need to be a little bit creative and how you can fix it and when in this case there's six different colors in the sweater so i was trying to decide i couldn't just replace the stripe with a full another stripe of a color that i was already using because it would have been very obvious that the sink sequence was completely um was completely different so i was going to try a couple things and then if i didn't like it i was going to give in and get another skein of the watermelon and selkirk worsted but literally i would have needed probably five yards to out of that skein and if i was a customer i'm not sure that i would want to do that unless i had some other project in mind to knit with the with the watermelon so i decided to come up with a solution that um that i thought would be cute so i don't know if you can really see my arms very well well before i'm talking for it so the sleeves look like this so from the elbow elbow it starts with the light purple which is the lady slipper autumn birch amethyst brooch watermelon and seafoam and this was the stripe that i was missing so what i did was this i put a little stripe a two row stripe of each of the colors so i had four colors left because there's five different colored stripes and neutral which are natural which is the the white in between so i just made these little little stripes so it looks intentional because it's not just like half done it's definitely um in sequence of how the other stripes go but the red stripe is missing so we had did a little survey in the mill when i finished it because i was fully prepared to take it out and um get the the sorry the watermelon yarn and redo it but kind of was unanimous that it looked kind of cute so i'm leaving it so that was the fix that was the fix for the stripe i'll take a picture of it so you can see it a bit closer then um i did the cuffs in the autumn birch so this is how much yarn i had left i don't know how it's probably i don't know five five yards or something like that so that was cutting that pretty close i um had this much of the white so this is all from one what each i had one skein of selkirk worsted in each of the colors i had this much of the white left and i did all the stripes that i was supposed to do so that's pretty pretty awesome and then the colors i don't have my autumn birch or sorry my amethyst brooch left but i had about this much left of the amethyst brooch as well and i had quite a lot of the lady slipper and i had the seafoam so my intention was to also do the neck in the watermelon but obviously that was out and seafoam is a beautiful color but for me like next to my face it's not really the best color for me so i was hesitating using this for the neck but i didn't really have a choice because the um when i did the lady slipper here for the call like the the collar or the yeah the neckline it didn't look good so it didn't it it should look perfect next to the um next to the amethyst brooch but when it got down here to next to the sea foam it was not contrasting enough the color is obviously very different but the just the two colors side by side didn't play very well so i ended up doing the sea foam for the neckline and then it's it's exactly the way that kate davies has done it in her pattern that whatever the neckline color is it came into that exact same stripe where the sea foam was and that's what she did she did the color it happened to be like a sea foamy color on her sweater as well so she did the neckline and then it melted into that stripe on the on the front so this is it looks exactly like the pattern so it looks like it was planned that way planned that way not what i had intended but you know i had most of the neckline knit and i i realized i didn't really like the color combination the way that it was so i changed my mind and i did the it did the sea foam and it's it looks great i'm perfectly happy with it so i have to admit about something that happened while i was finishing my sweater something that it's pretty unbelievable because you think you think that you're um you can do more than one thing at once and that you're paying attention to what you're doing and even if you're watching tv or whatever that you may be you know perfectly capable of watching tv and knitting something as simple as a cuff all in one color but the weirdest thing happened to me i started knitting the cuff and i was going along and it was going pretty quick and i it just didn't look the same as the other cuff so because i had it on a circular needle that was a little bit um it stretched the fabric quite a bit i was kept thinking to myself is it because the needle cord is in there that is not looking right it looks it looked kind of sloppy and my tension is usually i'm not over tight but it's not definitely not loose my tension and it just like looks kind of looks sloppy and and not as neat as the cuff on the left arm that i had already done and i couldn't figure out for the life of me what was wrong i double checked the needle size that i was using and it was right and i got the cuff i bound off the cuff and i had still had the yarn attached and i thought i just don't like the look of it so i put the two cuffs together and i realized that i had done a one by one rib when it's supposed to be a two by two rib i couldn't believe it i must have looked at it a hundred times because i wasn't liking the way that it looked and i never clued in to the fact that i was doing a one by one rib instead of a two by two it was absolutely such a ridiculous mistake to make i couldn't believe it but i guess that happens and i was watching tv while i was doing it so it's just a good example of you think you're looking at something and understanding what you're looking at but you're not you're not looking at it really you're just kind of glancing at it i guess and i couldn't and it was weird because i couldn't understand what happened to my tension why my tension was so bad and of course that when you're doing that a one by one rib the knit stitches uh do come out like a slightly slightly looser for me anyways what i what i found and it just looked like i had the wrong needle size but i knew for sure that i had the right needle size so i had to rip all of that out the cuff i was done so i had to rip it all the way back again and uh re-knit it with the 2x2 rib and it's perfectly fine so i just never saw it until i literally had the loop pulled out from the needle i didn't break the the yarn thank goodness so i just simply ripped it out and it took me i know 45 minutes to fix it but it was just so dumb i couldn't believe i couldn't believe it but i guess we all do that kind of thing from one time or another so that was the story of uh it was everything was going so smoothly until the end of this project when i started running out of yarn and then doing you know crazy mistakes like that but anyway i'm really pleased with it um i'll take a full shot so you can see what it looks like when i'm when it's standing up but i there is i mean it needs to be smoothed out a little bit because i haven't blocked it like i said so that's the uh that's a finished object of my own so it's been quite a few weeks since i had a finished object of my own and usually we do the works in progress first but i saved those to the until after the finished object because it kind of melds into the shop update as well when when i'm going to talk about that so the good news is is that paisley is back so now that i've finished this sweater i have doug paisley out again for people for the sake of people that maybe this is the first time that they've watched this podcast i'm just going to show you this is paisley paisley kafka or kofta from sizzle hoivik and it's a beautiful jacket knit with her norwegian wool and i was almost finished the project when i started the even dune and then i just felt like i wanted a relaxing knit and the even dune was supposed to be that relaxing net so i have the first sleeve uh the first sleeve is is done and uh so that's that's uh all finished and this is the jacket itself so again for the benefit of people that might not have seen this already it's steeped in the front and the stakes are not cut yet and the sleeves are also staked so i think you can see that that's sticking there so this will just be cut from this little hole down here at the bottom all the way up and i haven't done any of the cutting yet so i'm going to save that save that for the end i can actually hardly wait i thought i would be nervous but now i've watched so many people sticking their their sweaters that i'm not nervous and this wool is perfect for that it's like a nice um a nice woolly wool on from norway so it's uh it's just lovely and the back is this checkerboard pattern of the jacket and i know this fits well i'm assuming it fits perfectly obviously i can't put my arms in the sleeve but i have kind of pulled it down a little bit and i kind of moved it around on me and i and i'm sure that the measurements are right because i measured 100 times while i was doing it so the last thing i have to do is the other sleeve and i have it here so i already have the color work and the cuff done so now um there's a lot of there's a lot of just i'm going to grab my ball of yarn here because it's stuck in the bottom of my there we go there's a lot of ends in the color work part because it's a pretty um i'll show a picture i took a picture in the summer of when i did the other cuffs so i'll insert that picture but you can kind of see what it looks here looks like here so i'm right to the point where i have to start the the checkerboard pattern and i've started it twice because i didn't like the the way the pattern goes around because there's a lot of decreases that have to have to happen and you start in the middle of the chart so i didn't start at the right point the first time i did it so i started it over again so i've done done i mean i did two rows it's not like it was a big rip out that i had to do it's just i just want to make sure that i'm starting in the right part of the chart so that has come out of hibernation and will be started on again and i'm really excited to get this done the sleeves don't take that long because it's just uh you don't even i mean the pattern is just repetitive all the way all the way up so this shouldn't take me too long to do and the other thing that i've been working on is we mentioned in the last podcast i think that we have the new felted tweed colors in from um from rowan so it's felt it tweed color and it's a variegated yarn it's kind of hard to see on the ball what it looks like but it's um i don't know if you can really even see that so this one is blue and purple tones and it's such a long repeat that it's really hard to see so that's one of the colors and this is another one so it's quite a gentle color transition this one is called ripe and it's kind of got oranges and then it goes into like a cherry red so those are two of them but we weren't really happy in the shop about how you can tell what the actual what it's going to look like when it's knit so we jennifer hicks janet who works with us and myself we all took a couple balls of the felted tweed color and we decided to knit gigantic swatches out of one ball so i'm going to show you what they look like so i still have i they've all done there jennifer jennifer and janet actually finished theirs i haven't finished mine yet of course i'm the slow one so um what we're knitting is a straight stockinette cowl or dicky i guess because it's not a loopy cowl it'll just fit over your neck and it's just a very simple pattern it's 120 stitches cast on i'm using a 3.75 millimeter needle and i decided to do just four uh four rows of the seed stitch after the cast on and i'll end it with four rows of seed stitch and i'm knitting this one in the amethyst color so you can see it goes from blue up until to a dark green and then it's going to end on blue because i can see the end of the ball inside is is blue so it's going to end again on blue so you're going to have that that graduation of the color but i'm going to show you the other ones that have been completed and i'll tell you what number there and if i can read the name on that yes i think i can read the name so the first one is number 21. i just have these little hooks on them because we have them hanging next to the next to the yarn in the shot so this one is called blush and it goes from a pink through a bluish gray and then or a gray blue and up to kind of a rosy color so that's the 21 blush then we have magenta which is number 23. i'm knitting um the orangey one that i i held up is number 22 this orangey pink one that's called ripe then 23 is magenta and this one was knit by janet and she decided to experiment a little bit with um 120 stitches then she did 115 stitches and i think this one is 115 stitches around it's just a stockinette tube like it's couldn't be simpler and i'll even throw this on just so you can see it's just uh they're really oh it smells good we are using euclid rapture or it's now called jasmine hopefully that didn't go on the microphone too much but they're really really cute and there is enough that you can pull it up over your if over your hair like that but you'd have to have something around the back of your neck because there it's not long enough to really cover the back of your neck when you put it up like a hood but it was really just a swatch so okay so that's magenta then the next one is um chestnut which is number 24. there you go you can see that goes to dark from dark purpley's down through a brown to a kind of a rusty orangey color gorgeous for fall and the next one is this was another one that janet did and she was down to 110 stitches for this one it's number 25 and the color is frost so you have kind of a nice icy blue and going into a purple and the next one is called succulent this one was done by uh i don't know if this one was jennifer hicks or jennifer or janet i'm not sure but it's blues and greens together so it's kind of a cool combination so you can see the repeat is really long and the last one is chartreuse so this is number 28 and it's really really subtle it's just a very like a different variations of green and this one also has the seed stitch ends on it so it's that one so it's great so there's a book of patterns that goes with this called felted tweed colors the felted tweed color collection and we do have that in stock uh i'll show a picture i didn't bring all the books over with me this time i'll just show pictures uh pictures of them so we have that in stock and there's patterns in there for accessories and also there's a really cute little cardigan that's made from the amethyst which is the one that i'm doing with this these greens and blues so the blue comes across in a big stripe on the middle it's really really cute simple patterns because they're really highlighting the qualities of the yarn so that's the felt to tweak color so if you want to make one of these little dickies it's like i said you cast on 120 stitches or less if you want janet went down as i said to 110 in her samples and i wouldn't go lower than that because then that makes it fairly um it's not tight by any means but you wouldn't really want it any tighter than that for what you're doing and you just knit stockinette in the round all the way until you're uh have enough to bind off and then you bind off and that's it and you have a beautiful um this beautiful little cowl to put in your coat when the weather gets uh cooler so that's it so felt it tweet color so um so that we're gonna go right into the shop update because that was kind of the first first item for the shop update i am gonna show you another slideshow from magazine 70. the last time we were here i said i had talked about some homeware that was knit the patterns are all by martin's story i think and there's some cushions and things throws that are in that collection so i'm going to show the homeware collection so this is if you haven't had a rowan magazine before they divide the magazines each issue is divided up into usually three stories so the first story in magazine 70 is platinum which we've shown shown the patterns from platinum so we've seen all of those patterns from episode uh the first one we showed was 78 in 78 i showed some and then there's more in episode 80 so those are all done and now i'm going to show you the home where the knitted homeware collection that martin's story did and then there's one more story in the book which is called vivid by georgia farrell so i'll show that in the next the next episode like i said before in the last episode there's 47 patterns in that magazine so it's it's really chocked full of all kinds of great projects and we couldn't show them all at once so without further ado we'll go to the slideshow showing uh the martin story section homeware from magazine roman magazine 70. so [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow it's just cute and that little eye that blinking eye is fantastic and uh it's just a really really cute collection with the reindeer and then the blinking blinking eye and there's lots of fun little projects in that that slideshow so i hope you enjoyed that now i do have a shop update on books so i ordered a knitting comfortably by um carson de mer and i did get those books in and they sold out right away so there's they're no longer in stock so in one week they sold out so i just ordered more and they're on their way so i am going to put them back in inventory and uh but you may if you do order it then you may have to wait a little bit until it comes in i should probably have it by the middle of next week but those books it makes a great gift too for a knitter if you uh if you know another knitter or a gift to yourself and for those that aren't familiar with that book it's a book about all of the ergonomics of knitting so he covers everything it's like a textbook almost because it's very um precise and and you know there's no knitting patterns in it or anything it's just about how you sit while you're knitting that you shouldn't cross your legs like all of those kind of hints and what is happening with your hands and your arms if you're having any aches and pains talks about your neck talks about your hips so it's just a great resource if you're having any issues and since we're coming up to christmas knitting season which knit who doesn't have issues starting to happen um at this time of year when we're knitting our projects that we want for ourselves and then knitting furiously for everybody that's on the knit list and so this is just a really a really good resource to have that he gives little exercises and everything and it's just a really great great book to have so those will be back in stock in the last episode i also talked about the fact that i wanted to explore a little bit more about crochet so thanks to some of the viewers i got some really good comments about different resources for crochet and somebody suggested that i look at the maurit magazine so i actually ordered those so they're coming i ordered them today so by the time they ship i'm not exactly sure when they'll be back in stock i won't put them in inventory until i get a notification that they've been shipped for sure and then i will put them in stock but you may if you order it when they come in i'll send it in the newsletter um probably the next newsletter i'll have an update so i will send information about them in the next newsletter if you haven't subscribed to our newsletter the way that our newsletter works there's a space to subscribe if you on the the landing page for our website so the home page down in the bottom right hand corner there's a place to subscribe to the newsletter you you hear about the the podcast in the newsletter but also i'm doing it on the weeks that we don't have a podcast and the weeks that we don't have a podcast i'm always featuring something new that the people that subscribe to the newsletter get the get the link first to order anything that i'm that i'm talking about new so if you don't subscribe you have to wait to until you watch the youtube episode to see the new things and sometimes the new things sell out from the newsletter so i don't even i don't even show them on the on the podcast so for example we had advent calendars for with the most beautiful stitch markers from firefly notes we had them last year and i got an order this year and i featured them on the newsletter last week and they sold out from the newsletter so there are things there are benefits of subscribing to the newsletter so if you haven't done that and you think you might be interested in uh receiving it then i suggest uh that you would you would sign up from our website so uh so the advent calendars are sold out so the um the other thing that's coming and i talked about this in the last newsletter as well but i haven't enough to talk about it here is i have ordered blue stockings so that's kate davey's new book so that's on its way here it's just a great concept so if anybody if you're not familiar with her what her concept is for blue stockings it's actually a collaboration with nicole poole i hope i'm pronouncing her last name right and i believe that nicole has done a lot of research on 18th century an 18th century association called blue stockings the blue stockings and it was a group of women and some men so they did allow they were very inclusive so they wanted everybody to be able to come that wanted to come and they um there were a couple men that had joined as well but it was mostly a women's group and they were knitting they were knitting and doing other things and it seems like there's probably a lot more to it i haven't read the book because it's not out yet or not it's been sent yet but there's a ton of research and some ep and some essays about the blue stalking club or association and then there's um eight patterns in the book uh there is uh seven patterns for different kind of different socks so there's low socks and then there's a higher higher socks which they're calling stockings and there's also a pattern for a shawl and like all of kate davey's books when you get the book you also get a digital download code that you can use once to get a digital download of the book so i have ordered those they're on their way and you can order them pre-order them now on the website and if you order something else at the same time as you order the blue stockings book sorry then you will just ship your order all at once so you won't have to wait long they're really super fast from kate davey's design so i'm sure that they're going to be here within within a week or so so you can you can pre-order that book and we have a yarn as well so this was also featured in the last newsletter but we can make as much as we want it's a it's a limited yarn but it is we've made it available until october 31st so it's called haunted wood and i'm going to just show it to you and i'll take a close-up picture and it's a variegated yarn it's uh it's quite dark we do a veil technique over this with a black with a black and it's reminiscent of bramble or fiddlehead um but it's not the same it's kind of kind of it's a darker yarn than either one of those but it has this beautiful splash of uh really like rusty orange to celebrate the fact that the leaves are starting to turn in the the woods and deep deep purples and deep mossy greens in it so it's just a gorgeous color and the name is really interesting because you think that it's just because of halloween coming but it has nothing to do with halloween actually there's a trail called the haunted wood trail that you get access to right from the anna green gables complex at that park in cavendish and it's a beautiful walking trail that goes through um a gentle wood i would say because it's kind of like space spaced out it's not like a deep dense wood woods and there's little wooden bridges over streams and stopping places that you can stop and it's called the haunted wood trail so this this yarn is celebrating that trail and it's available because it's um we make it here obviously so we can make as much as we want but we're going to have it available until october 31st and then after that it'll be it's a limited edition so it won't be available anymore so just one more look so you can see it okay so you can order order that now as well so that's available and i think that that is oh one more thing is this is for your christmas list we had been out of stock of the swift again these swifts are made from beautiful birch and maple wood and made by fox mountain spindle so scott from fox mountain makes these and we have these in stock we try to keep them in stock all the time but they they usually don't last very long and this swift is fully adjustable and it's very easy to put together and to take apart but i've showed this on the podcast a few times but in case you're new i am going to do a separate tutorial on how to put it together and take it apart so this is the swift part is like extremely smooth action which makes it uh beautiful the woodworking is uh is absolutely beautiful as well and he just does a i don't know what kind of a finish it's on it but it's very smooth and just lovely so i will show that these all of these pins are adjustable to different sizes so depending on what size skein that you have and then you can take off the swift part and you can build yourself a yarn buddy it comes with it and the yarn buddy looks like this so this is um you put your ball of yarn or your cake on here this one has been untwisted and twisted up again numerous times so the ball is a mess because i'm always demonstrating it in the store and you have the the top that keeps your your yarn in place and you have a a stick here that comes off so this is a separate you can buy the yarn buddies separate and when you buy the iron but buddy separately the the stick that's in the middle is glued on when you you put together your yarn buddy from your swift the uh the stick screws off but the base is this is the same so this is the same base that's on the swift so if you just want the yarn buddy for your to feed your ball of yarn you can just buy that separately and if you want the swift and the iron buddy then that's those two things come together so those are both those are both in stock actually so i'll put that back on there after because that's going to be a big mess so those are back in stock so if you uh you want to create a christmas list then that's a good item a good item to have or for yourself it just makes your life so much easier when you uh when you can have that so i'm not going to show the video of how to put it together again now i'll just do it as a separate video and that will be in the tutorial section on the youtube channel if you want to see see that so the last thing that i put it in the shop update but it's actually not something that we're selling here but there's always lots of questions in fact i answered an email just today about what how yarns look when they're knit up if i have swatches or samples of them so for example if you're buying a variegated yarn like like the haunted wood what does it gonna look like when it when it is knit up and i subscribed to the modern daily knitting newsletter and there was just this great article which i'm going to put a link in the show notes too that jillian murano wrote about what is the yarn going to look like when you knit it and she goes through all the different types of yarns that you can get that are variegated so she shows what a speckled yarn looks like when it's knit up she shows a yarn with solid variegation like this so that there's no white space whatsoever in the yarn also one that has white space in the yarn but bigger swatches of color and she shows she did the knitting on the swatches and i just thought the article was so great it gives you a better idea of what you can expect when you purchase a yarn like that if there's not a sample in the store we have some samples in the store but um you know not everybody half of the people that we that shop for our yarns are not in the store anymore you're online so it just gives you a good she just did such a great job writing this article that i thought it was uh really worth it just to put it in the um in the show notes so you'll see a link to that article over on modern daily knitting about that so that should help you to visualize how your yarns are going to look and if you have speckles in your stash and different variegations in your stash you'll be able to to figure out sort of how how it's going to look and you just untwist the yarn and you can see the type of variegation that there is and she gives an example of all the well most of the different types that that you might find so i'll put that there for you so i just want to talk a little bit about wool woolstock east which was last uh weekend it was september 17th and 18th i attended that festival on the 17th and i just want to give a shout out to faith drinan from sisterhood fibers because she did she organized the event it was just excellent um and you know with everything you know things going on with forth waves happening everywhere it was a bit of a uh you know it was i would say that it was brave of her to keep going because uh you know there was just news popping up before the event started but she was so well organized there um with you know lots of space in in the venue a limited amount of people at a time there was all the pro protocols that were being followed the public health protocols and i was there sitting in the knitting circle so there was a sisterhood circle which was a knitting or spinning there was spinners that were there as well and i felt totally safe everybody was masked of course because all of the atlantic provinces have mandatory masking back in place here and anyway it was just a great event so just a shout out to faith for thank you for inviting me to attend and it was just a great great time and it was so good to go around and see booths again and just had that you know feeling just like the old days about only there wasn't wasn't crowds it was well spaced out and everything but it was uh just a great event there's not really anything new to talk about the pei fiber festival we're just still the committee is still in the organizing phases so there's not much to talk about other than the date that it'll be september 23rd 24th and 25th of 2022 so um seeing the work that faith did at woolstock gave me hope that yes there is a chance to have fiber festivals again um so there's not really much to to talk about there so i think that that brings us to the in the middle section so we're going to go to the die room so in our mill we have a wet room where we do all of the washing of the fleece and we do the dyeing there and there's lots of water splashes around in there so it's in a separate room from the rest of the mill and we're going to go back there and check out some uh like a quick view of what we do when we dye our yarns if you didn't know already we actually use greener shades dyes so those greener shades dyes have they give their color without having heavy metals in it and so they're safe it's an acid-base dye i think i talked about this just in the last podcast as well so acid-base means it's a very gentle acid it's citric acid and we use a food-grade citric acid so i wasn't sure what they use citric acid in but there's quite a few things like including dill pickles so that's that's one of the things that i know that the citric acid is in there and we use a food grade citric acid to do our dyeing with the greener shade dies so anyway we're going to pop back to the dining room and take a look about what's going on in there hi everyone here we are in the mill and this is the dying room and the wet room this is jennifer kicks mentioned about her uh knitting all the time so she's dying up some clover today in the uh in the dining room so she's wearing her respirator because we're dealing with uh so jennifer's just uh dying up the amount of dirt sorry weighing up the amount of dye that she needs to go into the um the dive at which we're going to show you in a few minutes once she's finished with this and this uh dye solution has been mixed up at a one percent depth of shade is how we uh call it how what it's called and uh it looks quite dark but it's going to be a beautiful light gold um clover color so here we are at the diva and jennifer's about to add the citric acid so like i said in the introduction we use citric acid for the mordant of the dye and now the amount of dye stock that we measured out or she measured out is going into the water and i'll show you a close-up of what that looks like inside i think i got pretty stirred up so you can see okay so you can see that that's a fairly light shade and sorry for the shakiness there and she's going to bring up the basket from the dye bat and she's going to lay in the um the yarn so she's this is lace so there's a lot of fine yarn in the skein so she's just going to be really careful about the way that she lays it out in the dye that so she's making sure that she has everything straightened out so that it's not tangled and she lays it out flat and now it's not in the die at this point it's above the die okay so now that the yarn is all laid out there we just put it in the water and we make sure that there's enough water in there that the skeins can all be free floating so this is a very light baby kind of gold color clover so you can see um there that jennifer just make sure that everything is covered and coated uh so that it's going to be picking up the die okay so now we've just lit the burner under the die bat and we're going to let the yarn heat up till it's almost boiling so it's just under the boiling point and then we're gonna come back and see what we've got when that's done okay we're back and it's been about an hour and a half or so an hour and a half let's say and the vat has cooled down and the yarn is the water is clear around the yarn so now we're going to take the yarn out and we'll just show you how that looks we've got a nice little and now we just uh have to um take the water off the yarn and we do rinsing this we rinse the skeins with cool or cold clear water and when they're all rinsed we put them in lingerie bags and we're gonna take it over to the washer so we'll be back to see that in just a second so this is uh so jennifer's now just rinsing the stains with cold cold water you might see a little bit of steam come up and that's just coming up from the vat because of that underneath is still warm but the yarn is cooled and the water is cold as well so we rinse it in pure cold water all right so we'll just take these stains put them in a lingerie bag just the regular kind of lingerie and over to the washer now it goes in there to the washer close down the lid and now we're just going to spin it to dry it okay so the spin cycle's done so now we're just going to take the stains out and jennifer's going to put them on a hanger and we have our rack if you're wondering what that noise is in the background the guy is uh chopping our wood today or making blocking our wood so there you go so that's it so the dyeing process is done we just hang them on the rack to dry and when they're dry then they'll be stained up and out on the shelf that's it all right so that's uh that's kind of the mystery's been unveiled there so if you're interested in trying dyeing yourself we do have a greener shade die kits as well so you have they only make nine colors so you have to mix the colors yourself so you know if you look at the color selection that we have it's amazing how many colors you can make from nine colors in fact you don't need nine you need um i would say three the three colors so either it's a blue a yellow and a red can make almost every color you can think of and then there's a black that will that you can add they're black so though with those four colors there's you can do everything but for ease of some of the mixtures are a little bit tricky so um they've uh they've got greener shades has provided some other colors that are already kind of pre-mixed to give a little bit more depth to the shades and everything and when you buy the kit you get a small sample of all nine colors and the instructions about how to do it and there's a little packet of citric acid in there so you can check that out on our website as well so that brings us to the harmony part so we're coming to the end i want to talk about last week's or last episode harmony part part a little bit because we had some questions about that when i was recording the episode last time i wasn't sure which harmony part i was going to use because i had two choices so we took a walk in along the confederation trail in montague or outside of montague montieux is a small little it's a little town that's uh closest to where our farm is and um that has just that beautiful walking trail that you saw and i wonder when i was doing the editing i didn't even know when i was recording uh recording the podcast last time but there was a fish that was jumping in the podcast so if you are in the harmony part so if you miss the fish jumping then you can go back to episode 80 go to the harmony part the chapters are all there so that's another point i should make is that when you're watching the podcast in the description there's all the chapters so you if you want to skip to different parts you can you can use the chapters to do that so if you want to go back to episode 80 and take a look at the harmony part and about halfway through there is a fish jumping in the water which i didn't see until i was editing so when i edited the podcast i i saw the saw that fish jumping so check that out and i guess what do they call that a little easter egg for you to check to check so now there was a couple questions about that podcast so at the end of that at the harmony part i was sitting on this huge round concrete structure and people were asking me what what that was and it was actually around now i forget what they but what they call it but it was a huge turntable that they used to move the engines the the train engine so as i mentioned before the confederation trail is uh made in it goes from tip to tip on the island and it's made in the rail beds that were uh with that for that were used for the railroad for the trains that were on pei so we don't have trains anymore on pei at all but those rail breads were all turned into trails so it's just a great project and the montague was literally the end of the line at that point at that point on the province so they had this huge big um turntable that the engine would drive onto that and then you could see in the harmony part there's like this triangular piece in the middle of that big round circle so the turntable was on that and they moved turned it around uh 180 degrees and then the train could go out the other the same way it came in so that's what that round structure was so it's still it's still there and there's all of the trails have interpretive boards so that you can read about all the different things that went on and different special things about each little place where the train station was and everything and the old train station is still there and it's used as uh there's a little restaurant in one part of it and there's um also artisans on main and is a as a co-op actually an artisan co-op that is also housed in that train station the old train station that's there so that's all about last week's harmony part so this week i'm going to use the other choice i had from the last episode and we're going to take a walk in a really old cemetery and the cemetery is about i don't know seven or eight kilometers away from our farm maybe a little bit more than that it's a tiny tiny cemetery at the end of a road that ends right at the water and it is i didn't know when we have talked about this before in different different podcasts we didn't know when we first moved here that our ancestors actually landed landed here in pei before they went to cape breton so my dad's family is from cape breton nova scotia but they actually started out here in pei which we didn't know so it's kind of really i mentioned that in the last podcast as well so it's really kind of serendipity that we ended up here and not only on pei but literally i don't know 10 to 12 kilometers away from where those ancestors actually had their farm so this little tiny graveyard was brought to my attention by a friend who had done some genealogy and she figured out that her ancestors and my ancestors were related she was following a line of the macphersons so the gravestones that you see that we do close-up of in this uh in this shot are macphersons and um if you're really really looking you can see that it's saying um from they were from nb so as soon as you see nb around here in atlanta canada you think new brunswick so when this friend of mine showed me these gravestones i said well they're from new brunswick they're not she's a no no it's uh she is north britain so they were from scotland so it was it was signified as uh north britain on the old old gravestones and um so the way that the macphersons and the doherty's came together was that the gravestone that you'll see is my five great grandfather and his son had a daughter and the daughter married a dougherty and they went to they went to cape breton in a place called lake ainslie and cape breton so that's how they're related and uh i'm obviously spring from the doherty line after that but um that is a five generation great great gravestone so we were there it was a beautiful day uh we get a little bit of view of the water that's there but there's quite a lot of trees that have grown up and the local community maintains that gravestone so even ergrave yard or cemetery and even though some of the stones had been broken and had had fallen down before they started to to take care of it they've put those stones flat on the ground you probably won't be able to see it in the in the recording but it's just been beautifully and lovingly maintained and it's just such a peaceful quiet spot close to the water that i think it actually makes a perfect harmony moment for the harmony part so i will say goodbye here if you like the video uh please hit subscribe we're over nine thousand again so we're headed towards ten thousand uh once again um you can rate select the bell so that you'll get notifications when we release a new podcast and send your comments i answer everyone i just love reading the comments and enjoy the harmony part visiting my great great great great great grandfather mr mcpherson john i think is his name so here we go to the harmony part see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Fleece & Harmony

Views: 6,796

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Id: rO64PMGwN7M

Length: 66min 30sec (3990 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021