dyeing with crowberries while on holiday (dye with krækiber)

Last minute i packed some of my favourite yarn (Empire, a 2 ply merino from Morris & Sons) with the idea that i maybe  could get a chance to do some dyeing while i was in Reykjavik. So when i went berry picking for the wild blueberries i also picked a pot of crowberries. Nice and black the berries.....i was hoping for something quite dark to come out.......
                                                                krækiber 

into the pot with the lot:

looking lovely and purpley and getting darker and darker......

actually what went into the pot was a bit more than the empire 2 ply. I bought some local wool:  'lovestory',  made from icelandic wool which has two fibres (and is a bit scratchy next to the skin, but it very light to wear as it is super warm)

The long coarse hair of the outer layer,'tog', repels water. The inner layer is 'þel' which is shorter, softer and fluffier.

Love story is lace weight (1 ply) made by Hélène Magnússon, (check out her web site)

so here is what i got:the photos are pretty close to the real colours too

blues through to lavender

from the left the darkest denim blue had the longest time through to the lighter blues that had shorter times in the pot. I put a couple of hanks from the pot in a plastic container and tucked it under the bed for a week and then reheated them over night to get the darkest blue. The blues are really lively and vibrant.

(the lighter lavender blue on the far right is the lovestory sample)

from my dyeing experiments i have realised that the superwash treated wools take up the colour with greater intensity and as i am obsessed with lace weight wools i've found the Empire 2 ply merino really suits my aim of creating an extensive set of colours and shades of colours suitable for embroidery.

i made a pie with bláber

bláber & krækiber

here it is, the pie-tart that i made from wild blueberries picked on the hills near reykjavik (on the way to seltun geothermal patch). I was airbnb-ing at Konni's place in sept last year.

• butter & a cup of flour & dash of water to make pastry (i just guessed the quantities), crumbed together by hand
• rolled with a bottle and pressed into a flan tin
• blind baked 'til light golden on edges
• meanwhile, cooked some jonagold apples with some cinnamon
• lightly cooked half kilo blueberries with 2 teasp brown sugar

then put it all together, sprinkled a few fresh berries on top and cooked it some more 'til pastry browned nicely on the edges

it tasted FANTASTIC with some cream dribbled over. sweet & tart and really fruity. seconds all around and it was all gone!

i spent a couple of hours picking blueberries (bláber) and also the very abundant crow berries (krækiber).  sadly, the crow berries don't taste of anything very much but there are heaps of them every where. the blueberries are a little more tart than our cultivated ones, as you would expect, but nothing beats rambling around picking and eating them wherever you are in the country side.......

This was my main blue berry picking patch. A lovely sunny day to lie down in the heather and watch the clouds and the cars of tourists stop by the lakeside. No one else wandered up the hill at all, which was why there were so many berries to pick even though this place is only 10 mins from the main road on a popular tourist trail.

the blueberries went into the pie, (or directly into my mouth) and the crow berries were used for a dyeing experiment. This will be my next post, all about eco dying with the black crow berries in Konni's kithchen.......(he was away for this experiment, so was not alarmed!)

finally posting something again

Just to get started again, i'll post some pictures of drill rig pits with nice patterns. Haven't done any drilling work this past year, so these are older shots. Anyway, pits are being replaced by the above ground tank system, so viewing the action is becoming not so easy or interesting.

metallic sheen on the bubbles: we've hit a coal horizon

nice low angled sun effect

the bubbles look like ball bearings rolling on metal sheeting here

a nice blobby effect, i think the picture is sideways.....

coal horizon, in the runoff channel to the pit

out of the coal

more channel swirls

i kept putting off posting as my pictures of the dying experiments don't really show the right colours. So, i'' probably just start anyway and post a lot about the this and that of the last year to unblock the pipe....visited clare in auckland in autumn...... i went to iceland with karen and stella in september. And then to uganda in october to visit the school that we raise funds for. the kids are gorgeous of course.