Marina Skua Ep 37 – Embroidering autumn leaves, knitting texture and cables, play with yarn scraps

Hello and welcome to the Marina Skewer podcast. My name's Marina, I'm a knitwear designer and and on this channel I talk about quite a few of my yarn crafts, so there's generally a lot of knitting and updates on what I've been working on and what I've finished recently, and there are also often some bits of spinning and weaving, and in this episode I'm going to be showing you a little bit of embroidery later on. And I'm feeling really inspired with my work at the moment. I'm getting on with a lot of things, there are lots of projects I've been putting in quite a bit of time on. I'm lucky that I've had a fair bit of time to spend on my knitting, getting lots of new designs ready, and I've definitely been inspired by the season. The fact that autumn is arriving, if not arrived, the rowan berries are out, the hawthorn berries are all ripe on the trees in the fields, and the very first of the leaves are beginning to fall, and it's just getting to that point where I'm feeling like working on heavier knits and interesting textures and things. And that's what I'm working on in the project that I've just been knitting on here. I'm going to show you the hat first, because that's the one I have already finished. So this is one that I finished yesterday. I made it fairly quickly, because it's effectively a sort of DK worsted weight yarn. I'm holding two yarns together, and it's a combination of two of my hand-dyed yarns. So this one is Mendip 4-ply, the colour is Rose, and it's on the Stormy base, which is a naturally beige base, a sort of naturally oatmeal-y colour, which gives a really nice heathery effect. And then I'm holding it together with Kaya Baby Alpaca, the colour for this one is Pandora, so it's this lovely, deep, rich burgundy. And I've held these two yarns together for a project previously, the Rombiel jumper that I made a few years ago I used different colours for. And this colour combination I had never really thought about before. It's not one that had occurred to me. Often I have a slight aversion to most shades of pink. This is as close as you get to a pink that I really like. I also like a sort of slightly apricot-y pink. But held together with this burgundy is really, really lovely. And I sort of stumbled across the combination by accident, because I was going through my bag of leftover yarns from other projects, other designs I've done, and I thought that these two together looked really nice. And I just knitted a few stitches, and then I was like, yeah, I have to make something, and I think it has to be cables. And so this hat was the result. And the yarns held together, they're sort of similar enough in colour that you don't get a really strong, mild effect or anything. But it does give an amazing richness and texture and sort of nuance. And you sort of get the qualities of both yarns. So the Mendip 4-ply is a woolen spun yarn, so it's quite light and lofty, whereas the Kaya Baby Alpaca is a finer yarn. It's much finer fibres, it's worsted spun, and it's a lot more sort of sleek and drapey. And you can kind of harness the qualities of both, which is really pleasing. And so this is going to be quite a nice warm hat. It's definitely not hot weather here yet, but it's coming. And so I'll be working on this pattern as well as the next one that I'm just about to show you. And hopefully those will be ready so that people can start knitting them for when the weather really starts to cool down. Hopefully you can see the crown decreases there, which I really like. I like interesting crown decreases, even though I'm... well, they don't always quite go exactly to plan, but this one I think has turned out very prettily. So I'm very, very pleased with the hat. And yesterday, once I finished the hat, I hadn't thought I was going to make a pair of matching mittens, but apparently that's what I'm doing. So I'm making these ones. You can just see I've got beginnings of the cable pattern on the front there. I'm doing them two at a time, as I always do, which means that I've got yarn management chaos, as I always do. If you've watched before, you've probably seen me get all tangled up in my yarn because I tend to like doing things two at a time, and often when you're working from multiple balls of yarn and two at a time, it can get messy. So I'm just about to start doing some increases for the thumbs on these ones. I'm working on four millimetre needles, so that's a US size six. So they're progressing fairly quickly. I mean, I started these just before dinner last night, and I've been working on them a little this morning, so I expect they'll take me another day or two to finish. And then I'll get the patterns all ready, and I'll be putting those ones out for test knitting. I think I'll be going for a fairly quick test knit round this time, and hopefully working with test knitters who are keen to try this combination of yarns. I'm going to put together some colour combination suggestions, because across the range of both yarns, you've got so many really good potential colour combinations, and I'd really love to see how they turn out when people try using them. So I'll be taking on testers for the hat and the mittens separately, but if people want to do both because they're getting the yarn anyway and make a matching set, that will be well exciting. So I've mentioned previously in episodes that if you are at all interested in test knitting for me at any point in the future, but I haven't necessarily opened a test knit yet, you can always sign up. On my website there is a form that's specific to test knit signups, and it just adds you to a mailing list that means that you get notifications when a new test knit opens and gives you the details for seeing if you want to be involved, and then an application form. And if you just want to be notified of when a particular test opens up, you can then unsubscribe once that one is done. It's all very casual, and that's the only thing you will get from that mailing list. I also have a newsletter, which is more general updates of pattern launches and things, but those are separate lists, so if you're on one you don't have to be on the other. So that is those ones. I'm very excited about those because I'm just really feeling the need for some textural work, which kind of comes into play with this project, which I haven't showed for a good while because I sort of put it on pause while I was working on other stuff. So in here we have a whole load of various bits of yarn, some of which there are very small quantities, some of which there's a lot more, but they're all things that I didn't really have quite enough for a whole project on their own, or at least not the kind of thing that I wanted to make. And I love this family of colours. If you've followed me on Instagram, you've probably noticed. I mean, it's basically the colour of my sofa. It's a colour combination that makes me really happy. And so I'm making this sort of improvised jackety cardigan thing. So I'm doing it in a slightly unusual order just to make sure that I optimise the yarn that I have. So I worked, I'm working top down, so this is the back of the neck here, and then I did down to the little section under the arms there, and then I put the body on hold and picked up for the first sleeve. Usually I would do the sleeves two at a time, but I've already mentioned my habit of getting tangled up in my yarn, and this was a project that I already knew was going to be a bit of a situation with managing yarn, so I decided to do my sleeves one at a time. So I finished the sleeve. I've still got my markers going down here so I can see how frequently I've decreased, and I will just replicate those for the second sleeve. I'm not going to try and replicate the stripes or anything, because I am just picking out yarns to introduce and drop out fairly at random. I'm holding multiple yarns together at any given time to give a really chunky texture. You can see in some places that's led to like some slight lumpiness, where some of the yarns are heavier than others. I'm quite happy with that. I'm expecting this to be a really casual and very cosy and warm thing for, you know, a little bit of cheer when going out on walks and things when it gets really cold, and also a lot of that will block out because these are all completely natural fibres, and so they tend to behave themselves quite nicely, as long as I don't accidentally shrink it, which would be disastrous. So I've got some nice moss stitch texture on the body, which I think is just visually really interesting and just really pleases me, and then the sleeves are just plain stockinette. So once I've finished this sleeve, which I have only just started, I've just done a few rounds there, once I finish that sleeve I'll then work down the body until I estimate that I have just about enough yarn left to finish off the button band. Then I will do that. Hopefully I'll be able to get a nice squishy button band. It'll be two by two ribbing. I lie, it'll be one by one ribbing, as I've done on the cuff. And yeah, it's a really fun project. It progresses very, very quickly because I'm working on eight millimetre needles and lots of yarns held together. So it's quite heavy and it's definitely going to be really, really warm, which I'm excited about because I like being cosy and warm. And yeah, yeah. So the next one I'd like to show you is a jumper that I've finished. I've actually finished another jumper since the last episode, which was a sample for a design, but it's one that's going to be in a magazine and so I can't share it. But yes, that will be coming out in a few months and so hopefully you'll be able to see it then. But this one is one that I am really, really pleased with and it's one that I'm having to resist wearing too much before I get a chance to photograph it because it's a very beautiful light colour and chances of me spilling something on it are fairly high. This is a jumper that I've actually been dreaming about in various forms for quite a long time. It's quite a simple sort of drop shoulder construction, but it has these nice wedges down the side. Now, if you watched the last episode, you will have seen this in progress, where I think I'd done a decent section of the body and now I have already been wearing it a little bit. It's the perfect cosy yarn. So this is Wool Decanted Vintage 20 DK. The colour is natural. It's both called natural and it's characteristic. So it's this really nice beige colour, which is a blend of Blueface Leicester and Shetland. And so I think the Shetland is, it's got quite a warm tone to it. So when they're blended together, you get this really nice light, heathery, beige colour, which I think is just beautiful. And it has just sort of just the right amount of stitch definition and softness and all kinds of nice things. So I really love this jumper. I think it's going to be definitely a wardrobe staple. This is one that is currently with my tech editor and will be going out for test knitting quite soon, hopefully early next week. And so again, I will put a link to the test knit signups, the mailing list in the description below if you are interested in becoming a test knitter for me. And yes, so the yarn for that one is Wool Decanted. And I think they will be offering a yarn discount for test knitters. And those are the knitting related things. But there's also another tiny thing I'm going to show you, which is this teeny tiny skein of yarn. This is the result of something I've been wanting to try for a long time, which is processing nettles, stinging nettles for fibre. So it's a very small amount of yarn. I do still have some fibre left to spin up that would probably make another similar amount of yarn but slightly different because it is a different quality of fibre that's from the same nettles. It's fairly coarse, it's rather like twine. And you can see it's got a whole, it's got a twist to it now because it's been in this tiny skein for quite a long time. But it is actually a balanced yarn. It's just remembered that. So you can see probably it's quite fuzzy. But it's also because of the processing methods I used and the fact that I really basically ran out of patience. It's fairly coarse. And so I am going to try knitting something with it just for, well, experimentation purposes really, because I'm not going to make anything useful out of this much. But it is a process that I really enjoyed. I documented the whole process and my experimentations and sort of coming to grips with the technique and working out what was working and what wasn't on Patreon. So I do exclusive videos on Patreon generally on a specific topic. And so if you are interested in nettle processing, I have learned a lot from Sally Pointer and Alan Brown, both of whom have made very good videos on processing nettles. And this one was just my experimentations with local nettles just from the woods down the road. And it's a really interesting fibre. It's the fact that I can make yarn, admittedly very slowly, but from something that I can go and pick from the woods or the fields. And it's generally considered a pest. No one really wants nettles on their land because they spread quite vigorously. And they're quite unpleasant if you happen to walk into a patch of them, but they're really useful plants, both for fibre and for dye. The leaves can give a lovely green dye. And for tea, I'm personally not a huge fan of nettle tea, but it's very good for you and some people really like it. So yeah, just a little fun experiment there, which I hope to be working on a little bit more. I'm going to try more use of nettles, but processing them less thoroughly, but so that I can see if I can make more of a rough cordage for use in things like coiled baskets, because I'm still obsessed with basket making. It's something I discovered towards the end of last winter, and I thought it was going to be a very quick fad that I went through. And I'm loving it now. It's just something that I'm really enjoying, and saving up lots and lots of plant material from various things. I've got a big stack of the stems I've chopped off this year's harvest of onions and garlic, which I'm hoping to make into a little coiled basket to keep cloves of garlic in. But those at the moment are sitting in a box, and I need to actually get on with that. So my house is slightly less full of dead plants. And speaking of baskets, this one is one that I made out of ivy and brambles. So again, things that I am just able to gather from the woods near my house. And in it, I am keeping a project that has been sort of in the planning stage. Well, not even the planning stage, the vaguely thinking about and expecting to get there one day stage, for a very long time. So these yarns, they're all the same yarn. So they're a singles lambswool, which is actually intended to be a weaving yarn, which I have a few random cones of upstairs. They're a natural grey, and it's British lambswool. It's not particularly soft. It's actually the lambswool that is in my skirt, along with some ramey fibre, because this is hand-woven fabric. And I tend to just dye odds and ends of it when I have leftovers of dye in the pots from experimentations and things. My regular colours, I end up exhausting the colour completely. So with the dyes, when I put the yarn in, the water is the colour that the yarn is going to be, and by the time it's finished dyeing, the water is completely clear. But sometimes, if I'm trying something new and haven't got a recipe that I've worked out over quite a long period of time, it might be that I use a bit too much dye, and then there's some still left in the water. And then I'll often just chuck in a little mini skein of this yarn to soak some of it up. And so I've gathered up quite a few of these over the years in various colours. Some are things that I dyed up deliberately for actual projects, but it means that I've got lots of them. And they're really great for occasional bits of embroidery. Some of them have worked their way into the scrappy, leftovery, jackety thing, but it means that when I started feeling very autumnal about everything, I wanted to do a little bit of autumnal embroidery. I pulled out all of the nice autumn leafy colours and decided to embroider onto this jumper, which is a very old, quite nice cashmere one that used to be my father's, which was discarded when my parents moved away and needed to get rid of a lot of stuff. At that stage, it was quite moth-eaten, so it's had a lot of holes in it. And I had quarantined it because I don't want moths, and then had just kind of left it for quite a long time, not really knowing what I was going to do with it, because I was able to repair the holes. I don't know, you probably can't see, but there's quite a whole patch here where I have repaired holes, and there are bits all over the jumper. And so it's not the sort of thing where I was going to be able to repair them completely invisibly and get it to an actually nice, neat jumper. And I thought the colour was just perfect as the background for these much warmer colours. So the intention is to just keep adding leaves. So I've done a little oak leaf here to cover a couple of bits of darns, and then over the shoulder I've got this rowan leaf going. And then I plan to do more with maple leaves and... what other ones am I going to do? I'm tempted to keep it to native ones, so things like the oak and the rowan are particular favourites. The sycamore I think I'll do in this yellow, because even though sycamores and maples are the same family, they're notorious for going a beautiful red in certain climates. In this country sycamore leaves just tend to go a really vibrant yellow. And then I'm just going to be looking out for interestingly shaped leaves that I can embroider onto this as I go along. And it'll be the sort of thing that each time I finish a leaf, so once I've finished the final bit of this rowan leaf, which I'm just going to do now to show you how I'm doing it, I'll be wearing it in between and then just adding more bits of embroidery as and when I feel like it, because I feel like if I just leave it until it feels done it's going to take a long time because it's quite a slow process and I need to fit it around my knitting and everything. And yeah, so I'm just going to add random leaves and it'll look a bit peculiar until there's a good collection of them where it'll look a bit more intentional. But it's a really enjoyable process, it's fairly easy, I'm just using chain stitch and tiny bits of running stitch and yeah, I mean I'm not a particularly skilled and advanced embroiderer, but I've got to grips with chain stitch fairly decently and I think it's a good one because you can use it both for creating quite linear designs but also filling areas quite nicely. So I'm just going to spend a little time embroidering on this and you can watch and hopefully enjoy some music, maybe make something yourself and maybe enjoy a hot drink or something. So I have just finished the round leaf on the shoulder there, I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out and you know it's not it's not completely perfect, it's a little bit messy in places, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to do enough leaves on here to cover all the various bits that need some attention, that the overall effect will be quite fun and nice. So yeah, I think next up is going to be a big sycamore leaf here because there are one, two, three, four patches there that have been darned and could just do with a little bit of prettifying. So I like that and it's a really nice soft jumper and it's just going to be the loveliest, coziest thing to wear once the weather gets a bit chillier and I'll be matching what's happening outside. So yeah, that's an ongoing project that is just nice to pick up and put in a little bit of work on every so often. So that's all I've got to show you, I will mention now the jumper I'm wearing is the Boscula which is one I designed, the pattern is available on my website and on Ravelry. The yarn I used is Garfennel, the body is number two in one of their undyed colourways and the contrast colour is Pentland in Willow and again there will be links to those in the description box below. And so I hope you've enjoyed this episode, if you want additional videos from me you can join up on Patreon, there are a couple of tiers there that offer access to exclusive videos like on how I'm, more details on how I'm doing the scrappy leftover jacket thing and the nettle processing are some recent ones. There's also a nice discord group which a few more people are joining which is exclusive to patrons only and we do regular zoom calls and things and it's a really nice little group. And you can also keep up with me on Instagram and my newsletter as I mentioned and yeah so until next time I hope you've enjoyed this episode, I hope you enjoy a little bit of autumnal making if that's actually the time of year you're watching this and I'll catch you soon, bye bye!