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This year for East Side Culture Crawl, I made laser cut necklaces. I will be posting them for sale in my Etsy shop very soon!

Love love these knitting patterns. All available on Ravelry.

22 Leaves Shawlette by Lankakomero

Summer Flies by Donna Griffin

Damask by Kitman Figueroa

Kirsten by Sonja Esbensen and Anna Rasmussen

Page 75 by Herbert Niebling

Ranunkel by Herbert Niebling

Cladonia by Kirsten Kapur

This weekend, or November 18th, 19th and 20th, myself and my house-mates will be opening up our studio for the Eastside Culture Crawl. It’s my first time ever participating (out studio was literally just finished a couple of weeks ago), and I’ve been busy needle felting and putting kits together.

Our studio is located behind our house in the alley, on Pender & Heatley. Head North East of the pirate house on the corner that you see in this google street view and you should find the alleyway. If you’ve reached Hastings, you’ve gone too far north. There are a few studios in the alley, and we’ll have our sandwich board in the alleyway.

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At the event, I’ll be there demonstrating how to needle felt, and displaying some of the work that I’ve put together over the past couple of weeks. Along with the kit comes a special barbed needle for felting, a foam pad, fibre, and an instruction manual for how to make a needle-felted mushroom. All of the felt for the mushroom kit was hand-dyed with Kool-Aid!

This series is based on the characters from the stop motion Rudolph series that we all watched growing up!

(Yeti still in progress)

I will also have some knitted items, and greeting cards available for sale too. Hope to see you there!

Dyeing with indigo!

The coolest part about indigo is that the colour changes once the item being dyed is exposed to air (and oxidizes). It starts as a bright green, and then changes to the deep blue indigo shade. It’s like magic. You can’t really see it in these photos unfortunately, I caught it after it had changed.

In other dye projects, I’ve been experimenting with natural dyeing by using jam jars (thanks penny!!) They work if they’re placed in the sun, but my stovetop gets pretty hot so I dyed over the stove. This solution is made up with berries that had gone off. I set out the blackberries and cherries and extracted the juices – and dyed some wool with it.

This wool was over-dyed. It used to be yellow – from a batch of onion skins – but is now this berry colour!

I also finished up a spinning project that I’ve been working on. Made my first hand-spun sweater! It was lots of fun, but it weighs a ton. Turns out I have to start spinning so that it traps more air – and less fiber, making it more “lofty.”

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