[music] Hello and a very warm welcome to the Green
Bean. My name is Katie and in these videos I like sharing snippets of my creative process,
lately I've been doing a lot of deep dives into specific crafts or projects be it spinning
or knitting or sewing, this is a more general episode I'm going to give you a quick flavour of
a few different things that have been going on in my studio lately, I've got some painting, an
update on my knitting and on my spinning as well. And of course I will take you out for a walk
with me and my little dog Jack out on Dartmoor. [music] I've still been doing a lot of painting
since I last shared with you. You can see that I finished the mushrooms I was working on
in the last studio chat and I've started a new piece that I was a bit nervous about at first
but I'm really enjoying it. So, it's here, this page of... hopefully at this point it's obvious
that it's going to be a rainbow of mushrooms and it was really important to me for this piece
to choose real mushrooms rather than just paint kind of abstract invented mushrooms, these are all
specific species that can be found in the UK, not all of them that I've seen in real life sadly
but I was just thinking how fun it would be to paint a rainbow of mushrooms and do we have
enough different coloured species here in the UK and we do! So this has been a really lovely
thing to work on, I've been really enjoying the process. I love painting with gouache
on black paper, I really love how the colour leaps forward and brings these mushrooms to life. My
plan for this illustration like many of the mushroom paintings I'm doing at the moment is
to turn it into stickers and or washi tape and as I mentioned in my recent newsletter I'm always
a bit nervous about sharing work that's in process, work that's not finished because I'm wary of
expectations, both my own and other people's, because I've experienced creative burnout in
the past and I'm always afraid that for one reason or another work isn't going to come
to fruition on the time scale I want it to. So I'm a bit nervous even showing this to you
in it's half-finished state when I'm really happy with it but I have kind of made a decision to try and
be more open and honest about what goes on in my studio that was always my intention when I
started making these videos and it's kind of drifted ever so slightly away from that as I've
got more and more nervous about expectations and I'm trying to kind of consciously slow down and go
back to the intention I had when I really started making these videos which was to share my
creative process, ups and downs, the good bits and the hard bits. At the moment I'm in a
really good bit and I'm in a really good flow with these paintings. As I was painting the
big sheet of rainbow mushrooms just to kind of empty my paintbrush and play with the excess
paints I started also painting a page of the same mushroom species but small and I actually love
how these are turning out even more than I love the large ones. They're just randomly sprinkled
on the page at the moment but I can see myself assembling them and putting
them together into some kind of repeating pattern it would be so brilliant
to have rainbow mushrooms on a fabric. I'm unfortunately not at the stage where I have
a budget to produce fabric for this autumn to go with this mushroom event that I'm
gearing up towards so it would have to be probably something to consider for next year but
I'm just really enjoying working on this piece and for now just going to try and sink into
the process and see where it goes. Now something funny happened after I recorded
that segment about my mushroom paintings is I just got into my painting, got into a flow
forgot to switch the camera on at any point and basically finished this rainbow painting, I was
planning to show you much more of the process but I forgot to switch the camera
on and document it so here I am just adding the finishing touches to this piece
and I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. [music] When it comes to knitting I've been pretty
exclusively working away on my Mithril jumper which I talked about recently. I haven't
made a huge amount of progress because I misread the chart at least twice and had to rip
back but still I think I've put a couple of inches on it and seen more of this beautiful cable
pattern emerge since I last showed it to you. I just can't stop knitting it, I'm really
enjoying this yarn and pattern combination. I'll briefly recap in case you haven't seen the
previous episode. This is the Nightingale jumper by Norah Gaughan from an issue of Pom-Pom
magazine and I'm using a yarn called Mithril by Stansborough which is the
very fibre that was used to weave the cloaks in the Lord of the Rings movies so
it's a very special yarn indeed for the story it's also a very special yarn in terms of its
texture I would love this even if it wasn't connected to my favourite mythology,
the breed is Stansborough Grey it's an exclusive, that's not the right word, it's a
unique breed distinct to that particular flock but it is derived from Gotland and the fibre
is very reminiscent of Gotland to me, obviously it's grey, naturally grey and this
beautiful kind of lustrous silvery colour with a lovely drape you can see how
it's draping in the knitted piece as well. This is the back of the jumper and
the only piece that I've knitted so far. Probably after I've done this for a
bit of a rest from the cables for my brain which is clearly struggling with the
chart given the mistakes I've made and for my hands I'm probably going to knit a sleeve
next before I continue with the front body piece. But yeah a fair bit of progress on this and
continuing to really, really enjoy knitting it. [music] Let's talk spinning and start by saying
thank you to everyone who left feedback on my recent spinning episode helping me to decide
which fibre to spin for my first garment project. After much deliberation I have chosen Barn Owl
which if you'll remember was the smaller quantity of the two and knowing that this won't quite
be enough to make a full garment by itself I'm going to also spin a small quantity of plain
Zwartbles fibre which will be a rich dark brown intending to use that for the ribbing so a
neckband, cuffs and a hem as well. Special thanks to Hedgehog who is a viewer who reached out to
me on Instagram to tell me the fibre blend. They had also bought this fibre from
John Arbon when it was released as a special and they not only were able to confirm the fibre
blend but show me their finished hand spun and I think that was the thing that tipped me over
the edge into choosing this one. So before I spin it I have a bit of plying to do
and I've got show and tell which relates to how I'm going to choose to spin this. So when
I last spoke about spinning I was spinning this singles which is Devonia from John Arbon textiles
and I've also spun this singles and you may or may not remember that I was spinning these two lots
of the same fibre with two different approaches so this light one was spun traditional worsted
short forward draw and this dark one was spun from the fold and my idea was to ply them both
the same so that I can have a direct comparison of what the two drafting methods do on the same
fibre. Now as it happens this Barn Owl blend is a very similar blend of fibres to Devonia. I
think it includes Exmoor Blueface, Bluefaced Leicester, a bit of Zwartbles and Wensleydale, so
it's going to spin up very similar to Devonia. So with that in mind my intention with these
singles is just to do a quick chain ply on them, I definitely want my Barn Owl to be spun
as a three-ply, probably a traditional three-ply, because my chain playing skills are... they leave a little bit to be desired but it's
a new technique to me so I'm still learning so rather than avoid it I'm going to chain ply
both of these singles and see how they turn out. In the meantime I remembered that I had a skein
I've forgotten to show you which was also from those two Devonia fibres, these ones I drafted
the two fibres the two tops together to make a spun marl so when you make a traditional marl you
would spin singles of two different colours and get a marl by plying those two together,
or more colours it doesn't just have to be two, in this case I held the two coloured tops side by
side and drafted carefully trying to get a little bit of both colours in the singles so it
created this more kind of heathered textured marl rather than a humbug, barber pole looking
looking marl, if that makes any sense at all. I'm pretty pleased with how this one came out. I'm
surprised that the dark green ended up looking much more black in this so it is a higher
contrast than I was expecting, I was expecting it overall to read as a mid-green whereas actually
I think it reads as a little bit black and yellow like a wasp or a bumblebee but I'm okay with that
it was just an experiment and it's going into the green blanket which I think I might almost be
ready to start, I'm not sure, I feel like the amount of handspun greens I have is a great starting
point but it's probably not quite enough for a blanket. But anyway, for now, I'm pretty done with
spinning green so once I have plied up those two, these two Devonia singles I will make a decision
on how I intend to spin the Barn Owl, whether it will be traditional worsted or spun from the fold
and be ready to start my garment spinning project. [music] Thank you so much for joining me
for this episode of the Green Bean I am really loving making and sharing
these studio chat episodes alongside more variety of videos it's nice for me to have
different kinds of videos to work on, somewhere I just get to be chatty and share what's going
on and others where I get to be more detailed and really dive into a project in more depth
than I get to share when I'm doing an episode that touches on multiple different projects. So
I hope you're enjoying the variety of videos too, and if you are, and enjoying the fact
that they are becoming more frequent, that's something I'm trying out to see
if it's sustainable for me and my work, please consider joining me on Patreon, I couldn't
make these videos at all without financial support so huge thanks if you're one of the folks who
supports this work over there. I offer various bonuses to patrons in return for financial
investment they include early access to these videos and the chance to watch them without
adverts as well as an extra episode every month and discounts on products in my online shop. So
once again thank you to my lovely patrons who make this possible and that's all! I look forward to
seeing you next time, thanks again for watching. Bye bye. [music]
