Tag: hand dyed threads

Busy

When I left the day job eight months ago, I thought I’d have loads more time to create. Hooray, I thought, at last I get to be a full-time artist. All that extra time for stitching and drawing and designing and sketchbook work…

The reality isn’t quite as I expected. I have a lot of tasks to complete, sometimes simultaneously, before I can get anywhere near anything I want to do for myself. This definitely isn’t a complaint. I love being my own boss, and I love the freedom that gives me. I also enjoy working, and I like to be busy.

It’s a good job because at the moment there is So. Much. To. Do.

There is a little heap of fabric scraps to sort into packs for the shop:

fabric scraps old and new, ready for making into packs

There is another pile of fabric scraps for my Stitch a Little Landscape course, waiting to be made into packs (and thank you everyone who’s purchased one, I hope you’re making beautiful landscapes with them)

Stitch a Little Landscape fabrics

There’s another pile of undyed fabrics for painting, also for the online course, also for making into packs:

luscious textures

And then there’s the thread mountain. Newly-dyed threads that need sorting, photographing and listing:

cotton and silk hand-dyed threads – some lovely colours this time

And thread taster sets, which take days to assemble:

thread taster packs coming soon

Everything takes twice as long as I think it will – I am optimistic by nature – but all of it is more pleasure than work. And dyeing is a kind of artistry too, I guess. So is curating fabrics and threads, and also creating any kind of online course. Interesting how the universe interprets and delivers your dreams into reality. It’s better than anything I could have anticipated.

I will take a break when all of this is done. But in the meantime, thank you for keeping me busy.

Thread

Dyeing this week, which means at least another week to ten days of sorting, winding, twisting, grouping, labelling, photographing, describing and listing. I no longer announce shop updates, but I’ll be quietly adding these into the shop in the next week or two, if all goes well.

hand-dyed threads fresh from the washing line

It’s a lot of work, and it takes a while to sort through. Just as well I enjoy every bit of it. There are some really pretty colours this time.

a rainbow of silk thread sets

Lucky me, I get to choose some of the leftovers – all the odd yards that aren’t needed for a full skein. Just right for a line of daily stitching.

thread ends, dyer’s perks

Apparently we have hot weather on the way here in the UK so I’ll be in a darkened room somewhere trying to stay cool. Enjoy your weekend if you like it hot 😎

Threads again

There’s nothing like a well-stocked shop, and at present I have nothing like a well-stocked shop. If you did manage to get your hands on some of the latest batch of hand-dyed thread – thank you so much, it’s on its way. If you didn’t, don’t worry – there will be more.

So now I need to start all over again. It takes a long time to hand wind every skein in preparation for dyeing. I wondered if a yarn swift would help to make the process a bit more efficient. They’re designed for hanks of thicker knitting yarns, and I was sceptical about whether it would work for finer embroidery thread, but so far I’m impressed. In the photo below there’s a textured yarn skein in progress, but it also works perfectly well for threads.

Yarn swift, newly installed and working very well

For the next batch I’m going to try dyeing larger skeins initially, and then wind them into smaller skeins after dyeing. I’m still trying to figure out what works best here, both for me and for everyone else. I’m not sure that I will continue with so many different textured yarns indefinitely and will probably instead start to focus on just embroidery threads after current stocks run out. I might make an exception for silk boucle, which is one of my favourite textured yarns.

Cotton and silk threads in progress

Also I’m not sure that I’m going to do the big announcement thing when threads are ready. While I’m really grateful that there is so much demand, selling everything in a matter of hours is exhausting. Ideally I’d like to keep the shop stocked at all times, so I will add threads as they become available. If you’re interested in buying thread, please bookmark the shop products page here and keep checking regularly. It will be at least a couple of weeks before there are any more, but I’ll be working on it in the meantime.

In other news, March has begun, and the theme for this month is windows.

Early March on the stitch journal

You can see that I skim off a few of the threads for my own use. Dyer’s perks, I call it. They’re just skein ends and seconds really. The purple cotton slub has a few white bits in it where the dye didn’t quite find all the yarn. This does happen with thicker yarns, and you can easily cover the white bits with couching stitches.

The first two days are based on images seen through windows. The cherry blossom, along with so many other signs of spring, seems very early this year. The wheel is turning and time carries the colours of spring and the changing light.

Early March: twigs, buds, and cherry blossom

New book, old cover

This week I’ve made a notebook using some light weight cotton rag paper – somewhere to collect colour palettes, swatches, and notes about colour.

Sketchbook page with colour notes

The paper signatures were easy enough – just folded pairs that could be stitched to the spine of a cover. The cover itself literally dropped through the letter box one day. I cut a corrugated cardboard mailer box to size and painted it white:

Free! Corrugated cardboard mailer cut down to size

The depth of the box turned out to be exactly the right size for a spine to fit the pile of signatures:

Signatures stitched to cardboard cover

I painted some abaca tissue paper with acrylic inks and collaged/stencilled it a bit and used that to cover the white cardboard. I’ve reinforced the spine with another layer of painted tissue.

Little book of colour (front)
Little book of colour (back)

You can still see the texture of corrugated cardboard underneath the colour but it’s functioning pretty well as a book.

Next job this week is to find a way through these, when they’re dry:

Hand dyed threads – it’s like waiting for thread to dry

If I can get through them all (and if I can stop myself from keeping them!) they’ll be available from next week.

On Work

Approaching the end of my first month as a self-employed artist, there is a lot to reflect on. Briefly, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard, and also I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. ‘Work’ means something different now. Primary goal for next month is to get better at managing my work/life balance, which is difficult when work and life have essentially become the same thing.

‘Work’ means this, among other things:

Thread dyeing in progress

It also means wearing a variety of different hats from one minute to the next. Some of the jobs I’ve done so far this month are Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Accountant, Goods Inwards Manager, Customer Service Manager, International Relations Manager, Tech Support Assistant, Logistics Manager, teacher, photographer, copy writer, proof reader, film director, video editor, sound engineer, dyer, content creator, and researcher. Haven’t had time to do any actual art yet.

But it’s a glorious feeling to wake up every morning filled with excitement for the working day ahead.

There will be thread in the shop soon (ish) – when I can get all of these skeins wound and sorted:

Textured threads
Cotton threads (they’re not all green!)

Here’s my Heath Robinson style skein twister. It’s a tiny hand drill I used to use years ago when I made miniatures, with a bent paper clip where the drill bit should be. The board is thick foam with a pencil stuck in it, clamped to a stool so it doesn’t move. I should probably patent it.

Unpatented Heath Robinson skein winder

I think some of the Teachable teething problems have been resolved now, and so far people seem to be enjoying the online course – I’ve been assured by several students that it isn’t only for beginners, which makes me very happy.

I’ll let you know when threads are available – it will take as long as it takes, but probably (I hope) some time this week. The shop will be temporarily closed while I list the threads, but it should only be down for a day or two. I aim to have threads in the shop every month from now on, if I can. The first batch will be UK post only, just until Royal Mail gets through the backlog of delays caused by strike action in December and the cyber attack earlier this month. From next month I hope to return to international shipping.

And on that note, it’s back to work for me.

Tangled threads

From this:

Tangled threads

To this:

Threads neatly wound onto paper spools

I call that a successful few days’ work.

To dye for

I had a few days off from the day job this week so at last had time to dye some fabric and thread. This has been on the to-do list for months.

Smorgasbord

Some for me, and some for you, eventually. There will be a shop update when I can get round to sorting these into groups.

Delicious!

While I was waiting for everything to dry, I made a cover for the little notebook I use for dye notes. I made the book many years ago, when I first started having a go at dyeing. I don’t record everything in it, as most of my dyeing is quite intuitive so colours are often not repeatable. There are other dyers out there producing set lines but I prefer the more individual approach.

Colour notes from 2007, handmade notebook A6 size
A6 notebook cover, fabric from Hipposinhats
Hand-dyed silk and cotton threads in action

I really like the colour test card. Accidental abstract art in action, I’m calling it.

Dye splodge colour test

Back to sorting and labelling threads…

Skeins of silk and cotton thread

Colouring life

Difficult to concentrate on anything at the moment with all the conflict and trouble in Ukraine, so I rounded up everything that needed dyeing. It takes days to wind skeins of thread, dye fabric and thread, wash it, dry it, iron it, and unwind all the skeins, but it’s worth the effort.

Pile of newly-dyed fabrics and thread wound into little balls

Most of this is vintage linen/cotton, and the threads are mostly new and vintage crochet cottons. I find they work well as hand embroidery threads.

They look delicious don’t they? Like a box of chocolates

I prefer my threads wound into balls like this rather than wrapped onto thread cards. I don’t like the creases you get when you wind onto cardboard bobbins.

Difficult to get decent greens with procion but I’m happy with these

There is a lot of fabric here. There always seems to be more than I think there is, and it seems to last forever. This is a Good Thing. Some of it will find its way into the shop eventually.

Stitch doodling

It rained a lot today. I spent my lunch hour road-testing some of the threads while the frogs hopped around on the patio. I have plans for some new work, which I will start at some point. I still have a couple of ongoing things to finish first. I added this one to the shop this week:

Make a Wish

It was originally the sleeve of a coat that I was never going to finish but then it took on a life of its own. It seemed to find its own time, as these things do.