Marina Skua Podcast Ep 30 – Shawl knitting, British wool, foraged baskets, and rosemary cuttings

Hello and welcome to the Marina Skewer podcast. My name's Marina, I'm a knitwear designer and yarn dyer based in Bath in the southwest of the UK and I'm also interested in slow textiles and seasonal crafts so working with materials that are available to me locally and making things that are pretty useful. At the moment it's really grey and rainy. We had a while where we were getting fairly regular snow, it wasn't settling or anything but made everything a little bit nicer and it was bitterly cold but now it's warmed up a bit which just means that we have constant rain as is England in February but that does mean that I'm super grateful for my knitting and making things that are pretty and cosy and so I'm going to show you some of the things I've been working on. The first is this cardigan that I'm wearing. This is one that I showed in the last episode and was very almost finished with and I think I was and I finished it quite shortly afterwards and so now it is done and I'm very pleased with it. This is the Snowland cardigan by Jessica McDonald. It was published in the September collection from Making Stories which was published I think towards the end of 2019. I think that's about right and it's a really nice cardigan. I made some modifications because I almost always do. So I alternated yarns so you get this nice subtle stripy effect. I then used just one colour of yarn for the neckband. I made the neckband narrower than called for in the pattern because I was definitely running low on yarn by the time I finished and I also made the cuffs rather than a really nice long cuff in the pattern. They're very very short, they're just a couple of rows again because I ran out of yarn. I actually had to bind off the cuffs with a scrap of the other yarn that I had used in the cardigan just to have enough to be able to bind off the sleeves at the length I wanted. So I did use every last bit of yarn which is really pleasing and it's a nice soft cardigan. I really like the structure of it. It's got interesting shoulder construction, it's worked from the top down and it's a contiguous set in sleeve so that you have shaping for the shoulder and then for the sleeve cap separately which is a really interesting method and I highly recommend that you give it a go if you haven't tried it before. So yes I'm very pleased with it. I did end up using the buttons that I was considering which are some wooden ones that my mother bought me in Argentina so I'm very very pleased with this. I don't have enough cardigans in my wardrobe. I love cardigans, I really like just how easy they are to take on and off but I don't really enjoy knitting them as much as I do jumpers and so I am working to try and make some more cardigans. Having said that the next thing I'm going to show you is a jumper, well a top of sorts. This is the one I have just been knitting on. This is the Ironwork Tee by Diana Waller and I have shown in previous episodes the yarn that I was spinning for this because this is hand spun yarn. It's this very subtle sort of greyish seafoam green with an immense amount of halo to it. I'm really really pleased with that. I hadn't thought when I was spinning it the fact that I was including a lot of yarn of fibres that tend to give quite a fuzzy halo so things like mohair, alpaca, angora are all fibres that I've got in this blend which gives a really nice soft effect to the colour work and to the fabric itself which is something that I'm really enjoying. It's it's got a lovely texture to it. I'm quite pleased that the hand spun, I didn't go to great lengths to make it consistent in terms of texture but that is working nicely. It's coming across as sort of a slightly tweedy thing rather than just looking like messy not very good hand spun which is definitely the case with some of my hand spun yarn. So I have just split for the back and front so it's worked bottom up and so now I'm going to be working flat just in this main colour and then as I continue I will possibly, well I'll see how much yarn I end up with because I've spun this yarn for the project but I'm not very good at spinning to spec as in spinning to a particular weight and thickness of yarn. It's slightly lighter than expected which might mean that I can eek out some longer sleeves for the top. Either way I'm really really going to enjoy it and so I think that's going to be very pretty. Next thing I'm going to show you is the pair up shawl which I am knitting in my Mendic Decay yarn. I've done a classic thing of I should have put this on a longer cable to show you. It actually does need to go on a longer cable to make it easier to knit. You can see sort of vaguely how it's showing out. It's got these diamondy eyelet patterns which I'm really really pleased with. It's quite a fun pattern in that you sort of need to concentrate most of the time. Most of it is quite intuitive but some of it you have to pay attention to which I think is quite nice in a project and just when you have to keep an eye on sort of the size of these diamonds and things. I'm really enjoying knitting it in the Mendic Decay because it's quite a heavy yarn and I'm knitting it on five millimeter needles which is heavier than I would usually knit this yarn on. You can see it's fairly sheer but because it's a shawl that will mean that it's a little bit more drapey and it will be really nice and warm because all those little gaps between the fibers will trap air in and will make it really nice to bundle up. So the color I'm using is plum and I'm also going to be using a couple of skeins of sky which is a nice dark blue. So I just have... I need to finish off this diamond section. I need to get to the point of the diamond here and then I will do the moss stitch section. I actually have a finished pair up here which I can show you and demonstrate what I'm talking about. So this is the original sample which is knit in ring cloud and sage origin yarn and so I currently, on the one I'm knitting, and so I need to get to the end of that diamond and then do the more complex diamond and then there's a moss stitch section, then there's another diamond section and then another moss stitch section and this one is my one which I love. I love these colors. I might have been able to tell already. I'm really keen on the warm colors and it's huge and really cozy. This one is a commission and it's really fun to work with colors that I wouldn't use myself necessarily. These ones have been picked by the person it's for and it's nice because I do tend to stay within quite specific color ranges. The next one I want to show you in the same yarn is my frostbeam shawl. This is knit in Mendip DK, my local lambswool yarn. It's wool and spun so it's nice and bouncy and the main color on here is sheep which is the natural gray so that's not dyed and then the borders are teal which is obviously a dyed color. The pattern's been out for a while. It was published in Making Stories issue 4 last year and I self-published the individual pattern in January and I just wanted to show you this because it's a really unusual shape. It's a shape that I really enjoy where it goes down to a tiny point at each end but then it's wider in the middle and I find this to be a really wearable shape. I just I tend to fold it sort of in half lengthways and then if you wrap it around there you get all the warmth around the neck without all the bulk on the shoulders which is something I really like too but it's not necessarily always practical and then you can tie up the ends and just tuck them underneath and almost wear it like a cowl that just sits really close to the neck because the thing I find with cows is that they often stand away from the neck and you can sort of tuck them and things they end up not necessarily being as warm as they could be and so this is really nice because you can tie it to exactly the amount of tightness and warmth that you want. You don't have to tie the ends you can leave them there and because they're not really bulky they stay in place and so they don't go flying everywhere. So yes it's a really fun shape and it's a really fun knit too. From the pattern it looks kind of complex because there are lots of charts but that is just because of the way the shaping is to try and make that as clear as possible for when you're knitting it. It's worked from one of these small ends and you increase and then you get to a little bit and then you start decreasing until you have a tiny number of stitches again and it's loads of fun. It's some very very easy intarsia work. So intarsia like there are lots of people who say they're scared of colourwork knitting. I think there's this sort of mythos about it and you see sort of really complex maybe fair isle or traditional Scandinavian designs or Icelandic yolks and they can look really intimidating. Firstly colourwork doesn't have to be stranded knitting so this here is stranded knitting so that's where you're carrying two colours at once or three or more. I prefer to just use two colours at once because it's much the way it's basically easier and less faff and I'm terrible at yarn management and it all gets tangled. So stranded knitting you're carrying more than one yarn at once and working with both in a row. With intarsia you rather than carrying them both at one time you knit with one up to a point dictated by the design, you drop it and you pick up another colour. That's the definition of that. It is really common in things like traditional jumpers where you have a big picture on the front. That's almost always intarsia but it's basically just switching from one colour to another in the middle of a row and the only thing you have to remember is to just cross the yarns when you get to that colour change so that you actually end up with a piece of knitting in two colours rather than two separate pieces of knitting in different colours. And I'll just show you there. You can't really see where the colours meet. There is a very slight sort of almost dashed line which is where the colours meet but in this design at least because the meeting is always at the same point. It's very easy, it's sort of a nice introduction to it and it's a fun construction that is much less complex than it looks. So the pattern for this is available on my website and on Ravelry and yeah it's nice. Also good for keeping the rain off. I think that's all the knitting I have to show you because I have been working on a lot of swatching for various designs. I'm submitting to quite a few things hoping to get into magazines. We'll see how that goes. I can't talk about that because I don't know what's going to happen with any of it. And so yes, lots of swatching happening, a few designs upcoming, some self-published ones and I'm just really enjoying all of my knitting projects at the moment. I'm enjoying having a little bit more creative time to work on those projects. Now as well as knitting projects I have been doing quite a bit of yarn dyeing recently. So I've just finished taking this batch of Mendip DK which is the same one as the two shawls I've just showed you. This colour is Night which is just, I love this colour, it's a navy but it's sort of a very slightly greeny blue but it's sort of got a dusty tone to it. I really really like it and it works with pretty much all the other colours in the range. So you can almost kind of treat it like a neutral. And yes, I'm doing lots of yarn dyeing because I have a show coming up this weekend. I'm vending at the Knitty Retreat, that's knit and then tea, tea as in cup of tea, and I'm going to be vending at their marketplace on Sunday which is exciting because I miss shows and even though the shows I'm doing now are from my house and it's me talking at a camera and hoping that people are out there listening, hello, it's really nice to just have that time to chat about my yarns and what goes into them. And so I hope you'll join. I will be running a discount code on the day for attendees of the show. Entry to the marketplace is free so it's going to be on Instagram. I'm going to actually put a timer on Instagram in my stories so that you can set a countdown thing so you'll be reminded when I'm going to go live. I'm also going to have a special limited edition colourway which will be revealed on Sunday for people attending the show and so if you happen to like my limited edition colours then do come along and check that out. With that I'm going to talk about something that is quite important to me. I'm going to beg your forgiveness in advance if I'm a little less articulate than I might like to be. It's a subject that's a little bit tricky just because it involves sort of industry things and money and commerce and it's not particularly easy but anyway. With the situation at the moment, so various factors especially in the UK, British wool has been declining in price for a very long time. This makes it really really difficult for farmers who are producing fibre for us to use. Last year especially with the pandemic meant that prices plummeted and it has been a really hard year for a lot of farmers. I think if you've been following the wool world for a while you might have seen that recently there's been a bit of a resurgence of trying to find uses for British wool. There have been more yarn producers like myself working with local farms to try and use it as a resource and something that is nice and useful rather than it often being discarded or destroyed. It's often been the case that the only avenue that farmers had to sell their wool is to the British marketing board. Sorry they're just called British wool now. To British wool I don't like that monopolization of terms because British wool is wool that is British and hasn't necessarily gone through an organizational body. However, for the sake of clarity I'm going to continue calling them the marketing board in this. A lot of farmers, the only avenue they had to get rid of the fleece that they have is to sell it to the wool marketing board. The prices being offered are generally appallingly low, that's mostly driven by demand, but also a huge undervaluing of the resource that we have. In a lot of cases farmers have ended up destroying their fleece because it's actually cheaper for them to do so because they have to pay the cost of transport to get their fleece to wool marketing board. By the time they've done that they don't get the money back from the cost of the fleece to cover the cost of transport which is insane and so you have people burning it or composting it or whatever. The fleeces have to be shorn, like sheep need to be shorn. The way sheep breeds up now we don't really have primitive breeds, there are still some about, but the vast majority of sheep that you will see are ones that need to be shorn because they do not lose their fleece on their own. It'll just keep growing otherwise and then it gets matted and dirty and can be the cause of infection and disease and can be just really uncomfortable for the sheep. So for better or worse we have sheep that need to be shorn and farmers are producing a resource that is really really useful and beneficial that is not being put to good use in a lot of cases and so I could probably tell this is something I care about a lot. That is one of the major drivers in what I do. I'm trying to be a very small piece of a puzzle that supports local farms and produces really high quality materials for people to use and so last year I was fortunate enough to be able to place an order with the farm that I work with, Fernhill Farm, who produce the wool that I use for my Mendip range. They're on the Mendip Hills which is why it's called that. I believe in everything they're doing. They're farming regeneratively so in a way that's beneficial for the land and I'm really really pleased that I could financially justify supporting them at a time that was just rubbish for pretty much everyone and this isn't really a plea for help or anything it's just to sort of acknowledge that it's been a rubbish time for fibre farmers, it's been quite a difficult time for small businesses. I'm very very grateful that there has still been enough demand for me to keep going because this is what I do full-time. I also want to point out that Brexit has meant that a lot of EU customers aren't buying from the UK anymore which utterly makes sense. I don't blame anyone in the EU for not wanting to buy anything from here because it's very unpredictable and costly. So basically I want to thank all of the people based in the UK especially for having faith in local businesses and for buying yarn from small producers, from people who are supporting our farms and yes I think that's just what I'm going for with that. Thank you to those people who support the tiny businesses and I know that in the grand scheme of things the work I'm doing is fairly insignificant. I think that big change has to be driven by large corporations and organisations. I think fundamentally that is required for large-scale stuff but I think that by making positive small choices we can make a bit of a difference. I think I've run out of eloquence now. Yes, it's that. It's thank you to the people who are supporting British wool, as in wool from the British Isles, and helping keep tiny businesses like myself going and hopefully doing a good thing. And on the subject of wanting to opt out of market capitalism I'm going to show you some random basket stuff. In the last episode I think quite a few of you enjoyed me showing how I make cordage and using that for making barely useful tiny baskets. The basket progression has continued to the point where I'm making baskets of an almost useful size. So the first one I can show you is this one. So this is a frame basket which is yet... Random bit of flaxen wool on there. My house is full of misc fluff. It's horrendous. So this one I love. It's so cute. I have realised that I can fit a skein of yarn in there sort of happily. I can give them a friend but then beyond that it's not very useful for carrying yarn. But it'll be really good for when we have small harvests of things in the summer like cherry tomatoes or garlic. Things like that maybe. We'll see. And so it's again not a professional quality basket. There's a lot of stuff going on here that I have learned from and will use to inform future basket making endeavours. So the frame is ivy vines. So you make a loop and then another loop and you cross them over and then you tie them together at the joins there and then you shove some more spokes in there and you weep. There are much better resources on the internet for doing this than that appalling explanation. So the frame is ivy and then the weavers that I've used I've sort of alternated. I'm not sure if you can see they're slightly different in sections. So these are the willow bark and the cordyline leaves that I showed in the previous episode. These aren't made as cordage they're just straight fibres split and then woven with. Things I have learned. I think I even needed the spokes, so these ribby bits, to be slightly closer together or possibly larger bundles of the fibre or stiffer fibres for weaving. I mean it's fine. It's not going to be particularly strong for anything. I mean you can see that's boining a fair bit but it's really really fun to just learn without having to be too worried about wasting materials because I found them on the floor. Yeah, floor materials are excellent materials if you're learning and another example if you want to learn to spin but don't want to buy wool. Certain times of year you can find wool on barbed wire fences and on brambles. I've actually spun some yarn from wool I collected from fences and just floating about in the fields up in the Peak District. I spun a tiny skein of it a few years ago. I'll try to remember to put a link to that blog post in the description box below so you can read it. Free fibre. And then this is another basket. This represents a step backwards in terms of quality of work and outcome. It's not a good basket. It's just not. I've got lots of random stuff in here. That's the wool that I was using to embroider this shirt that I'm wearing. I've just been adding leaves to it occasionally when I feel like it which is always fun. I've got a few experimental bits of cordage in here. So this one is cabbage leaves but you know the outer cabbage leaves that you take off because they've gone a I've had to double it back on itself so it's like a double cordage. It's just broken. I was going to say because it's very weak and quite terrible. I mean if I pull on that. It's not very good. However, good things about this. When I was making it, it smells like rabbit food. Lots of childhood nostalgia there. Again, things that would have gone in the compost are taking a slight detour before going to the compost. This one is dead peace lily leaves. Again, I'm not super good at watering my plants at exactly the points where they need it. And so you just soak them up for a while and twist them into cordage. This one's turned out quite nicely. It's definitely much stronger than the cabbage. I'm not going to pull it too hard because I don't want to break it unnecessarily but there's a decent amount of strength there and you get nice sort of colour variation in it. So I mean what am I going to use that for? I might use it for tying up a tiny parcel. And then this one. I used this little needle. This is just a needle I carved quite a while ago from some prunings from the garden. Just using a pen knife and a scalpel to get the eye. And I used that for weaving this little coiled one. This is nasturtium from the garden as the like the core. So this style is made by you get a bundle of fibres and then you sew around them and you coil it so you stack them on top. So it's nasturtium for that. The cordage that I've used to weave the bottom bit is the willow cordage I was using in the last video. I didn't have nearly enough so I've done some. This darker one is hollyhock cordage. This hollyhock had been out in the rain for too long so it's sort of not strong enough. And then there's a tiny bit of bramble just to finish off that last bit there. So it's not a great basket. It's not very strong. It's not very pretty. But you know again I can put misc items in it. Basically these are all acting as proofs of concept and working on my skills before I try making larger baskets which will actually be functional. My husband has requested that I make a decent sized basket for keeping our recycling in before it goes out to be picked up rather than the horrifying collection of plastic bags we have by the back door. So yes future basket making materials. I do have a big bundle of willow which I'm saving for when I can work outside because weaving a decent sized willow basket with the stake and strand method that I plan to use, there is a stage where it takes up an enormous amount of space and I'm not going to be able to do that in my house without destroying a lot of possessions so I will do that when it gets warmer. And in the meantime I've been heading to my local woods which you will have seen in some of the opening shots of this video and which I often post on Instagram. If you see me standing in some woods it's probably there because I love it there. So these are... these ones... can I separate them without making a load of mess? Right green ones are brambles. So I went out probably looking very suspicious, went with my gardening gloves and secateurs and grabbed these. I needed the gardening gloves for these because obviously brambles, well if you've not come across them, they have a lot of thorns on them and so the gloves you can use to strip along the vine and it'll pull all the thorns off and so then you can wrap them up in these and not worry about spiking yourself in the leg on the way home. And then these ones are ivy. So we have a lot of both materials, they're both great for gathering in the winter when a lot of other materials are not particularly abundant or not flexible enough to use for weaving. And so, you know, wandering home with a handful of these look a bit peculiar. But yes I'm excited. These need to stay out to dry for probably a week or two before I can start making baskets with them. I do want to recommend if you're interested in all this stuff, Forage Fibres, Susie, is she called Susie? Yeah Susie Grief on Instagram. She also has a little account on Buy Me A Coffee where she has some tutorials. I've been learning an enormous amount from her. She's very knowledgeable very much about the find fibres that are available locally and responsibly and make cool stuff with them. She makes a lot of beautiful tiny baskets and she has been an enormous inspiration. So I will try to remember to link her below. Now something I'd like to show you as we very slowly begin to approach spring and things are starting to grow again. I love rosemary. It's one of my favourite herbs and I really like the way it looks in the garden. And a lot of people don't realise that it's really easy to create more rosemary plants once you have one. So when I'm harvesting some for use in the kitchen I take pieces probably slightly longer than I would otherwise, about 10 centimetres long. I take nice straight unbranched pieces and then rather than just chucking the whole thing in whatever I'm cooking I strip the lower leaves off the stem and leave a little tuft of leaves on the top and those pieces will then go on to become new plants. And so the pieces that I take off the stem are already smaller and easier to use in cooking and if you run your fingers along the stem from the tip down to the base of the cutting it is really easy to peel those off nice and neatly. You do want to do this quite quickly after cutting the pieces. If you're going to need a little bit more time keep them in a plastic bag or something just to keep them slightly moist. And then all that needs doing is just filling an old jar with some water and put them in the jar and then leave them somewhere where they get indirect sunlight and then in a few weeks time they'll start growing roots and you can pot them and grow them on as plants. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. I hope you've enjoyed having a quick look at some of the things I've been up to. If you want to keep up with what I'm doing in between episodes I've just started a series of videos, which are going to be shorter ones, quite focused documenting a fleece to fabric project I'm working on throughout this year. So if you're interested in fibre processing and how raw fibres are turned into textiles and garments that might be of interest to you. And you can also join the Out of the Dark make-along which is a make-along using any of my yarns or patterns and to join in you just need to make something using one of those things or both. And it's sort of to celebrate this period of transition from the end of winter into spring and just something to keep us cozy while things are still a little bit grey. And I'll be picking winners towards the end of March and then there will be That'll be running on Instagram and Ravelry and I'll put the links to those below. If you want more videos from me I produce regular videos for Patreon and you can join me over there. We also do a monthly Zoom chat which is a really nice way to catch up and chat to people around the world about what projects they've been working on recently and those have been really fun. I started doing them fairly recently and it's been really enjoyable so if you want to come and join that little community I will have the link to my Patreon below as well and you can catch me on Instagram and Facebook and you can sign up to my newsletter. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I hope to catch you for future ones. Bye bye!