Category Archives: community

japan

We’ve arrived in Glasgow! More about that very soon but, for now, here are some moments captured on our 4-day stopover in Japan, where we caught up with friends just outside Osaka.

We spent a day in Nara, where sacred deer roam freely through all the temples and parks…

Temple guardian

Mama and baby deer

Scotto feeding the deer

Yoko and the deer

Baby deer

And visited a number of temples, including Todai-ji, the largest timber structure in the world and home to a beautiful 15m buddha…

Todai-ji

Daibutsu (none of my photos turned out as it was so dark in there!)

Temple butterfly

Temple incense

Timberwork

Patterns on the steps up to Nigetsudo

Lantern carved with tomoe symbols

Stairs at Nigetsudo

Kaisuga Taisha

Kaisuga Taisha, a glorious Shinto temple

And wandered the streets and temples of Kyoto…

Following the leader at the Emperor’s residence

On the way to Kiyomizudera

Maiko

Beautiful paneling and timber

Swan

Exquisite woodwork

And I snuck in a bit of plant hunting too!

Winter-flowering sakura or cherry

Wintersweet

Beautifully pruned willow

The 800 year-old wisteria at Kaisuga Taisha

Mosses and ferns cohabiting this tree

The ubiquitous Japanese camellia with a chirpy little friend

All in all, a brief but very lovely visit that I’m sure we’ll repeat on the way to or from Australia!

woolful, edinyarnfest and the craft sessions

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I’d like to send out a massive thank you to everyone who has left a comment here- and on Instagram, Twitter and, of course, in person!- in support and encouragement of our move overseas… It has meant a huge amount to me and I’ll be carrying you all with me when we head off at the end of January. Gee, the world certainly feels like a small place with the whole SM circus, doesn’t it?!

Just a few updates: if you haven’t already twigged to the joys of Ashley Yousling’s Woolful podcast, you need to check it out. This super smart and resourceful young woman is changing the way many of us see the yarn that we knit with and the fibre craft community that we are part of by opening up fascinating conversations with fibre people; from small scale to commercial, she’s talking to those involved in producing fibre (spinners, dyers, shearers, yarn companies…) and to those who use it (designers, craftspeople, artists…). I think these conversations will continue in yarn shops, at kitchen tables, in colleges and at fibre events around the world… A new episode is released each Tuesday and I was thrilled and very honoured to talk to Ashley as part of this week’s episode, mostly about natural dyeing and dye plants but our conversation meandered through many areas of fibre love! You can find all the eps over at Wooful. Oh, and Ashley and her family is also building a fibre mill in Idaho- I can’t wait to see what comes out of that place!

I mentioned in my last post that I am building up a stock of colourwork cowls to take with me to Scotland- well, I’ve signed up for a booth at the Edinburgh Yarn Festival in mid-March! It’ll be my first time selling my work in this kind of setting and I’m excited and a little anxious at the same time… But, at the very least, I’m looking at it as a great chance to meet and connect with the local knitting community. So, as well as packing up the house and catching up with loved ones, I’m going to have a busy 6 weeks of making!

And, lastly, it was bittersweet teaching my very last Melbourne class at Sunspun this week. It was great to finally run Fibre and Yarn 101, which was inspired by years of questions from customers about how to choose the best yarn for a project and why some yarn substitutions just don’t seem to work. I think my students left with a clearer picture of how different natural fibres behave and why different types of processing result in very different yarns and how to anticipate and work with that. But I’m really not sure whether there’ll be much opportunity for teaching in Scotland- perhaps natural dyeing will be the way to go, as teaching knitting there feels like teaching my grandmother to suck eggs! I’ll just have to wait and see and, in the meantime, will be so happy to take lots of classes to soak up as much of the local knowledge and tradition. But I wanted to let you know that I will be returning in September to teach at the Craft Sessions. It’s such a beautiful event that I don’t want to miss it and it also gives me a chance to bring back and share techniques and skills picked up over there. And, of course, to spend time with my family and friends. So it won’t be that long between cups of tea!

So that’s all my news for now. Have a lovely weekend!

knits for cold weather- and why we’re going to need them

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I finished this lovely, enormous scarf at least a year ago but I haven’t had many chances to wear it. Not only is it about 3m long and made up of dense cables but I used a super-light, core-blown 14ply alpaca yarn- and the combination makes it one very warm scarf, the kind you don’t often need here in Melbourne…

February Scarf by Beth Weaver

February Scarf

But that is all about to change… because Scotto and I are moving to Scotland!!! Eep!!! So exciting and, frankly, a bit terrifying too- it seems much more daunting to pack up my life and head out into the big world at 41 than when I was 18 or 23. But that is part of the reason we’re doing it. We want to strip away some of the things that hold us in order to try to flow with life as much as we can. Not that those things that hold us are bad; they are often precious and beautiful and together make up a lot of who we are.

But there is more. And I think that sometimes we need to push ourselves to remember that, especially after hard times, like the last few years for my family. On top of that, I didn’t expect to find myself without children and that’s been hard to come to terms with. I didn’t think I’d hear myself saying that there was anything lucky about it- but, yes, I am starting to see that we are lucky to be free to do this, to do so many things that would be much harder if we had those responsibilities. And we have the means to do it, to take the risk. We don’t have work or a place to move into or any friends over there… but we’re (mostly) ok with that.

So, at the end of January, we’ll head off. So much to organise and do between over the next 6-7 weeks (including building up a stock of colourwork cowls for an exciting project in Scotland-more on that soon!) and so many lovely folk to share time with. I hardly ever post photos of myself but here’s a few of the faces that I’m currently moving between on a daily basis:

Unsure

Terrified-excited

Shy

And ready to move forward.

Wish us luck, won’t you?

capeweed

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While out at Discovery Bay last weekend, I got a bit obsessed with photographing Capeweed (Arctotheca calendula), an environmental weed on mainland Australia. Capeweed is found in areas of habitation (gardens and lawns), among agricultural crops and pastures and in conservation areas, displacing ephemeral native species, harbouring pests that threaten indigenous species and posing a threat to the integrity of plant communities and the survival of threatened species in these sites.

So why photograph it? As soon as I got up close to this garish flower, I caught a glimpse of a much more subtle beauty. I often think that, if we can see beyond the context of our understanding of this and other species as weeds, we are able to simply observe them for what they are.

And also to learn how and why it is able to spread so successfully. It’s hard not to be amazed by the strategies of nature.

From budding to withering…

1: Bud contained within juicy, feathered bracts

2: Bracts retract to reveal the “petals” neatly tucked in. Daisy flowers are actually inflorescences or groups of florets; the outer ring of petals are ligular florets with a ligule or strap that looks like a petal.

3: The ligules unfurl

4: Opening to reveal the inner tubular florets

5: Open for pollination

6: The falling of the tubular florets reveals a tangle of wool that surrounds each cypsela or fruit

7: Fluff

8: The star-like floral attachment points resemble Venetian glass beads

9: The pappus becomes more and more fluffy in order to catch the wind for dispersal

9: The woolly cypselas become increasingly fluffy in order to catch the wind for dispersal

10: Ready for dispersal

12: Achene (or fruit) starting to be dispersed

12: Cypselas dispersing

15: Subtle colours… this woolly covering attracts moisture, creating a little germination bed and increasing the chance of survival of the seeds inside, once on the ground and ripe.

14: Dispersal reveals a beautiful receptacle

15: Remains of the tubular florets that ring the receptacle

16: All parts weather and brown

17: Beauty in senescence

dyeing with soursob, argyle apple and chlorophyll

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Hello! It’s been ages since I’ve posted here about dyeing… it’s been a really busy few months and we spent most of our end-of-year break painting our house, so neither dyeing nor writing about it have had much of a look-in… I’ve also got into the habit of posting photos on Instagram, which is so quick that I’ve realized it’s made the idea of writing an actual blog post overwhelming so I need to get back into the habit.

I ran another class on natural dyes in December, this time for the Handmakers Factory at the lovely Ink and Spindle studio in Kensington. I think I’ve said here before that I don’t consider myself a natural teacher but I feel really passionate about the need for good classes and skill-sharing so I push myself to get better at it. But I think perhaps that my love for plants and colour managed to override my nerves- teaching this class was an absolute joy!

This time, I included some basic sample sheets that participants could attach their samples to- it’s always so hard to remember what they are and how they were dyed so I thought it would be useful. Each one relates to a particular dye plant that we used on the day.

The first plant we dyed with was Oxalis pes-caprae (Soursob or Sourgrass), which is a widespread weed in Melbourne. I realize I need to start taking photos of the dye plants I use as an ID tool for the blog and classes but Soursob is small herb with a clover-like leaf and bright acid-yellow bell-shaped flowers in spring. I collected about 500gm of flowers in spring and then froze them for the classes I had later in the year (I find I get the same results with fresh or frozen flowers).

We poured hot water over about 2 handfuls of flowers and left them to soak for an hour while we did other things- heating flowers too high or for too long can destroy or alter the dye compounds. We then strained the flowers out and placed the dyebath onto the stove on low and added two sets of samples of alum-mordanted yarn (wool, wool/ silk and bamboo) and fabric (silk velvet, silk, coarse cotton and unbleached linen). We left them to heat for around 45 minutes and then took them off to cool. We then removed the fibers, put one set aside, added some washing soda to the dyebath (which changed the pH to alkaline and instantly turned from yellow to bright orange) and replaced the other set back into the bath. You can clearly see the difference in colours achieved from the different fibre types and pHs; interestingly, this plant seems to have more of an affinity with protein fibres, like silk and wool, whereas the cellulose fibres (especially the cotton) didn’t take up as much colour.

Soursob

Next up, we used Eucalyptus cinerea (Argyle Apple), which is found though the south-east of Australia and is often used as a landscape tree in streets. It yields far better colour when heated and cooled multiple times so I took it into the studio already soaked and heated over several days to maximize the depth of dye we could achieve. We simply brought it up to about 80C, then added a set of alum-mordanted yarn and fabrics and a piece of iron-mordanted yarn and took it off the heat to sit for 2 hours. I would have liked to keep it in the heat but my second stove refused to work on the day so we had to juggle pots! The dark brown yarn at the top right was iron-mordanted and took up colour very differently to the same yarn mordanted with alum.

Eucalyptus cinerea

And we used chlorophyll as our last dye, as I wanted to demonstrate dyeing with a weed (Soursob), an indigenous landscape plant (Argyle Apple) and a vegetable and I couldn’t get hold of my favourite purple carrot (more on recent experiments with that next time). I sacrificed some of the chlorophyll extract from wonderful French natural dye house Renaissance Dyeing that I’ve been hoarding since my lovely friend Mel gave me a pack of them. It’s produced from organically grown spinach and nettles and was very simple to work with, giving us lovely, soft green, that most elusive of colours when it comes to natural dyes!

Chlorophyll

As I said, it was such a joy to teach this class and I think everyone got a lot of confidence to get out and try dyeing with natural materials, which is mostly what people need, as it’s actually pretty simple! If you are keen to learn about the process in a hands-on session, I have some classes coming up at the Handmakers Factory, the first one at the beginning of February- you can find all the details here. I’m also playing with the idea of running a class on how to get 25 (or more) colours from one dyebath, so let me know if that sounds like something you’d be keen to do.