News

I am delighted to have teamed up with Sabzi in Edinburgh to create a monthly knitting and crochet club at breakfast time. This amazing Indian street food restaurant on Ferry Road serves the most delicious spiced meals in the morning! From November onwards, we will be meeting at 10am on the SECOND Saturday of the month and everyone is very welcome to join us for crafting, conversation and breakfast!

Ooooh the Seventies! Fleetwood Mac's Rumours; Queen's A Day at the Races; glam rock; punk rock; and funk! Chic; Village People; the Bee Gees; and the Bay City Rollers! And then there were the films: The Godfather; The Deer Hunter; Star Wars; and Grease! What was on the telly in the UK? Pennies from Heaven; Dixon of Dock Green; and The Good Life. What were we wearing? Ripped black jeans; safety pins; band t-shirts! Bell-bottoms; tabards; Night Fever suits; culottes; platform boots; and granny shoes! Plus I had a fetching pair of knee high Jaws socks! Don't ask! It was...

As a plant dyer, I am very interested in the mordanting process which can help the dye material better attach to the yarn fibres. However, there are many options available so which one should I use? I decided to carry out an experiment to determine how a range of possible mordants might affect the resulting colour, here in my dye studio in Edinburgh using Scottish water! I scoured five 25g mini skeins of Jamieson’s of Shetland undyed natural white Shetland wool and set one aside as a control. Next, I mordanted the other four skeins as follows: alder cone solution heated...

Last week, I attended an amazing "Make Your Own Zine" course run by Typewronger Books in Edinburgh. In case you're wondering, Zine is short for fanzine or magazine. Typewronger have a Risograph electronic screenprinting machine called Lyra that uses ecologically friendly bran oil based inks to print onto uncoated A3 paper which is then folded and cut into an A6 booklet. I carefully planned my zine in advance as I wanted to create a wee pamphlet with some of my urban dyeing recipes that I have been slowly formulating over the last three years during my various dyeing experiments and with my medical herbalist hat on. Making the zine was...