sweetgeorgia

Return to [sweetgeorgia] Mountain

Soon soon soon. We’ll be re-opening SweetGeorgia Yarns online in the next few weeks after I return from Whistler. My office is starting to look a lot like it once did… piled high with brightly coloured yarns and fibres… tags hanging delicately off the end of each skein. I’m excited to show you what I’ve been working on, but here’s a teeny tiny sample…

Yep, that last photo is my fridge full of pre-mordanted yarn. All I need to do now is add some colour… soon soon soon.

Some days I want to gough my eyes out.

And other days, I am saved by the beauty in things like this:

It’s 100g of 20/2 cultivated silk. First dyed lightly in weld. Then dyed in marigold. And finally overdyed in madder. It’s absolutely gorgeous in the skein. And I am grateful for the light it brings into my life. When all else is dark and despondent, I am thankful that I can see and see beauty in something as simple as colour.

Stretching to grow.

Without a doubt, I love me some sugar-crazed pink and red. But lately, I’ve been going completely out of my element and dyeing colours that I absolutely love but are just so unlike me.

The weld and walnut are from Earth Hues in Ballard, Seattle. The indigo is Maiwa’s natural indigo. And the silk is all different weights… fine 20/2 silk laceweight, dk-weight silk singles, heavy worsted silk/merino singles.

I’m experimenting and just trying to work with colours that I’m not entirely comfortable with… I’ll grow into these. The most interesting combinations are actually the walnut dyed silks that are overdyed in indigo… the result is this earthy green, dark gold colour. It’s almost impossible to describe.

Tangled up.

I’ve been making warps. Many many warps. Mostly because I have a lot of yarn lying around… naturally dyed, undyed, synthetically dyed, commercially dyed… omg, that’s a lot of yarn. Rather than using handpainted yarn throughout the whole warp, I’ve taken to mixing it up with a bunch of other solid coloured yarns.

The six-yard warp will end up as two 2.5 yard scarves or shawls (I haven’t decided… there’s still a lot of handpainted yardage remaining that I want to use up)… each one will be woven with a different coloured weft.

The bamboo was dyed in a pot with a bunch of other fibres and took on so much less dye. The dye pot was a mix of cutch, cochineal and iron in various combinations with silk and bamboo in the pot. I probably wouldn’t wear any of these colours on their own, but optically blended together, they become more interesting. The weft will likely be plain undyed bamboo, and then the whole piece will go back into the dye pot. Maybe more cutch. We’ll see.

Finally, this is the silk yarn that came out of the same pot. Unplied DK-weight silk yarn to be woven with some 2-ply cutch-dyed silk yarn… it might be overwhelmingly cutchy brown. Hmm. But luckily everything can be overdyed and re-worked. In fact, I dropped a small plain weave silk sample that I wove last year into a cochineal dye pot earlier this week… and you know, I LOVE it. Multiple dyes, overdyes, piece dyeing… I want it.

Diamond Fantasy

Vancouver is seriously lacking sufficient light to take photos right now. These were shot at 6400 iso. 6400. I can’t even believe it.

The Diamond Fantasy Shawl is done and blocked. Knit out of the Silk Lamb Lace yarn, I followed Sivia’s instructions to the letter — the shawl is 10 repeats with the icord edging. The perfect size. Divine and soft, I love it. If you are in Vancouver and want to see it up close and personal, it’s actually at the three bags full shop right now. I’ll probably leave it there for a couple weeks… and I doubt I’ll need to wear it anytime soon!