April Blues........... Colouring my year.....

Blue is the new spring green...............  Well apparently after the winter months blue is the April sky as in Irving Berlin's:

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see...............

There is a knit-a-long for April, knit anything as long as the yarn is blue............. and I happen to be knitting two shawls both with an element of blue..............................strange old world ain't it?

 

This is Siberian Iris by LindaCC  which was inspired by the Siberian Irises flowering in her garden.  I love her patterns and aspire to design shawls nearly as nice as hers

 

Well this got me thinking about colours and association with particular months - for me yellow is March, lots of dancing daffodils as Wordsworth's poem, 'A host of golden daffodils'.

 

 

January is white for the snowdrops that appear from under the ground when everything looks dead.

 

 

But what about the other months?  Pink for cherry blossom is May and Strawberry red is June, October is rusty reds and oranges from the leaves as they fall from the trees, November is grey and December Black as is February (both bad months!)

 

That leaves July, August and September all summer months - perhaps August should be purple as it is named after a Roman Emperor but I am completely baffled over July and September - nothing stands out as a striking colour that jumps into my head when I think of these two, and then I suddenly thought July is the Tour De France so multi-colours as in the jersey's of the riders - yellow for the overall leader, green for the sprinter and red polka dot for the king of the mountains, and white for the best young rider and there is the Tour de Fleece challenges on Ravelry which is always for me bright colours!

 

But what of September?  As a child September was back to school after the long summer holiday, new uniform and shoes and the inevitable essay 'What I did in the holidays' but no colour bring these memories to life.............. although last year, 2012, and the Paralympics in September, the colours were purple and orange of the Games Maker's uniform and memories of the wonderful event that I was a very small part of!

 

So April is blue for now, perhaps monitoring the thermometer which is currently standing at

 -C and the weather maps show the British Isles as ranging from dark to pale blue due we are told to the Jet Stream being to far south!  Perhaps I shall need the shawls currently on my needles to keep me warm during the summer months to come!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

I can sing a rainbow....

Well perhaps not sing, because I am tone deaf and sing flat and completely out of tune - in fact at school I was made to mime the words so I didn't put the other off!!  Is it any wonder that I am such mixed up person?  Although Mr S and I did provide the backing group to Simon and Garfunkel last night of the M5 aftering collecting Demelza

What I have been doing is blending colours on my drum carder, and the words of Sing A Rainbow kept popping into my head - red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue!  I haven't actually put this particular combination through the carder (it would probably come out a muddy brown) but I have been having the most fun ever with a drum carder.

All this was prompted by a discussion on Ravelry (when isn't it?) and the request to show the result of blending using the custom blending service at World of Wool.  I had used the blending service before, but to put together blends of fibres for dyeing.  My favourite is Polwarth and Silk 75/25 and if you have passed though five times you get the most gorgeous silky soft spinning top - bliss!

What I hadn't done was to use the Custom Blends to mix colours.  I have to admit I am a bit nervous about choosing colours like this, as monitors differ and my conception of a colour might not be how it comes out.  The Gaywool dye Spearmint is a example of this. Spearmint to me is a pale minty green, the Gaywool Spearmint comes out more a Dijon mustard colour.  So do you jump in and risk not getting the colour you're expecting or do you experiment?

You blend.................................

First blend Autumn Leaves was inspired by this picture

For this I blended Black, Mocha, Caramel and Red and added a very small amount of yellow and this was the result

Not quite as light as I had envisged, but perhaps with a touch more orange it would be perfect.  And then I made lots of punis

For the second blending I took more photos so here is the colours I chose

From left to right - Dark Forest Green, Pale Blue, Turquoise Silk, Grass Green, Spearmint, Sherwood Green and what I would call a Dark Blue Green which I think came in a mixed bag. 

This was after the first pass - I added the colours fairly randomly and blended the silk directly on to the drum.

The second, I split the batt into five strips, and then pulled the fibre out and added more silk directly to the drum

Third - just repassed through the carder

Four as Three

And this is the finished product

Spring Meadow (darker than the photo - the light is bad today and the flash bleaches out colours) - may need a little yellow to even out the bluey tones.  Total 50grams of light airey fibre.........