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Tuesday 7 November 2017

Channelling your inner avocado ...

Remember back in the day when anyone mentioned avocado in the context of colour and it summoned up images of drab, sludge-green bathrooms from the 1970s? Well, for me, those days are very firmly yesterdays. Now when anyone mentions avocado I start to channel visions of warm apricots, dusty salmon pinks and rose-tinted light browns.

No, I'm not dropping acid. Honest, guvnor.

This is what happens when you use your discarded avocado skins and stones to make a dye bath. And let's face it, with the current vogue for mashed avocado on toast with optional chilli flakes for heat, most of us have plenty of skins and stones that are destined for nothing loftier than the compost bin.

Well, hold onto your re-cycling for just a moment: you've got the makings of the very easiest and most environmentally friendly dye bath since the invention of the colour wheel. The thing is there's enough tannin in them there stones to act as a natural mordant to make the colour attach to the fibre so you don't need to go messing with any nasty chemicals that might go on to pollute the water table.


Monday 6 November 2017

Reflecting on a seasonal change ...


Last week I was pootling around in the sunshine, feeling as though summer hadn't really gone anywhere, and could safely be relied upon to hang around for the indefinite future.

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Happy Halloween!

A very Happy Halloween from sun-kissed Catalonia.


Today Emi has been busy carving pumpkins. The above beauties are all his own handiwork. I should explain that the chap in the centre has just been violently ill, and as a result his innards have been vomited onto an obliging sheet of kitchen paper. The sad fellow on the right has an eyeball dangling out of its socket, whilst his friend on the left has some random stickers that used to spell out welcome - as in ... welcome to the Bates hotel ... or one of the outer circles of Hell.

It's nice to see that the young chap has a suitably ghoulish imagination. I found him searching around on Pinterest and Google images for inspiration.


Friday 6 October 2017

Dyeing to tell ...

I've been having so much fun. The autumn sunshine has added unexpected joy to the season here in London. And a couple of life-enhancing changes have recently overtaken me, which have also added to my little quota of joy and happiness.


Sunday 1 October 2017

Dealing with a burgeoning yarn stash?

Many of us yarn-aholics have an enduring, perennial problem in the storage department. Our stash has a tendency to grow quicker than our capacity to consume it by turning it into gorgeous hand-knits.

It's a complaint that I hear again and again on the knitting holiday circuit. My guests all seem to have the same nagging problem: cupboards and closets that were not designed to accommodate the outsized proportions of their stash. And, given my own line of business, I've got a yarn stash that would fill a small room.

So, what are we to do?

Well, if you've got stuff that you know you're not going to get to for a while, I may have an answer for you: vacuum storage bags. You can buy them on Ebay from 99p a pop.

Just lay all your yarn out nice and tidy inside the bag. You'll have a deliciously fat, squidgy parcel to start off with.