Marina Skua Podcast Ep. 1 – Knitting, dyeing and carding Batts

Hello and welcome to the Marina Skewer podcast. My name is Marina. I'm a dyer and spinner of yarns and also a tech editor and fledgling designer of knitting patterns. I'm recording today in Bath, a city in southwest England where I live and work. You can find me on Instagram, Ravelry and Facebook as Marina Skewer. I'm Marina Skewer everywhere and the podcast is going to be about mostly knitting and yarn but also occasionally other crafts and things I like to make. Today I'm going to be talking about a couple of the things I have on my knitting needles at the moment and I'm going to give an overview of how I create the colours for one of my yarn lines and I'll also show you how I process fibre to get it ready for spinning so it'll be start-to-finish creation of an art bat. So I really hope you're going to enjoy the podcast. It's my first one and so I hope it's something I get used to and I'm really excited to share some of the things I'm working on. I'm going to show you some of the things I'm knitting at the moment. I'm not going to show you all of them because at any given time I usually have about six things on the needles. I'm the very opposite of a monogamous knitter, you know, I'll cheat on my knitting projects in front of each other so they can't get jealous. They all get to get got to eventually. So one thing I've been working on for a while is this little pair of mittens. I always work on socks and mittens two at a time because I think it's just a really good way to do it. I'm a very very impatient person and if I finish one mitten I'll just be pissed off that there's another mitten to do still. So I do them two at a time. It also makes magic loop slightly less painful so I just do them on needles in the round. I do the same for sleeves as well on jumpers when I'm working them round. So this is in my Mendip four ply yarn. I'm using three colours so there's the Fox Stormy which is the dark orange and Sunny which is the bright orange there and then Stormy Leaf which is the lovely green there. And so I've got my little balls of yarn here and so the pattern for these ones is from my friend Alex's book Colour Knit Mittens which is a lovely concept. I'm not generally into adult colouring books because I can just draw things and colour them in myself but with this one you've got the patterns for the mittens. I think there are 12 patterns in the book, can't actually remember, but it has the layout in the grid of the colourwork pattern but without the colours included and so you can colour them in to suit whatever yarn you're using which I think is a really lovely idea and it means that you can work it for two colours or three colours or however many you want to. The way I've done it for three colours means that to get between these two bright orange stitches here and these ones here it actually requires really really long floats and I hate catching floats so I sort of wish I'd thought about that beforehand but I think it's going to look really nice once they're finished. The design for these ones is called zigzag and so these are going to be nice big chevrons that carry on up the mittens and then there'll be more green at the top. So yeah I love those, I'm actually excited to be knitting with my own yarn because it's not something I often do and yeah I need to get more stuff done in Mendip because it's just a really nice yarn to work with. The second thing I'm going to show you is, this is slightly awkward to show, this is the bottom of it, this is called the oak moss tee. So it's going to be a sort of t-shirt, well not really a t-shirt, a sort of top with sort of little off shoulder drop shoulders, well explained, and so it's mostly stockinette, it's done in the round up to the underarms and then front and back work separately and it's got this lovely little moss stitch border at the edge which I really enjoy and that's part of the name because it's worked in well English moss stitch which is what people in the US and I think other places would call seed stitch. Knitting world doesn't like to do things in a straightforward way in different countries but yeah so it's it's got the moss stitch and also the colour is really similar to a kind of lichen called oak moss so I really like that, I like naming things after things found in nature and I'm hoping that when I have the pattern ready to release for this one that I'll be able to do a shoot in a forest or something because I think that would be lovely and so I will actually be looking for test knitters for this one in a couple of weeks, obviously it's difficult to show you what it's going to look like because it's only half done but yes it's going to be really lovely, I think it'll be a good piece for layering because I'm not keen on wool t-shirts because they get really warm but then your arms get cold and I'm not good at that, if I want to be warm all over, so this is a cotton linen blend yarn I think it's 40% linen 60% cotton or vice versa, I've got the label here it is 60% linen and 40% cotton so it's in this beautiful pale colour so it's a sort of grey green, in most lights it looks grey but it is actually slightly green and it's got this beautiful slubby texture to it, the yarn's from Woolly Knit and it's called Linen Lux and it's a completely European yarn so the linen is from Belgium and the cotton is grown in Spain and the yarn spun in Spain and then sold in the UK so yes I will be looking for test knitters for this and I'm hoping anyone who's able to test knit in the original yarn, I'm chatting to Woolly Knit and hopefully I'll be able to offer a discount to test knitters for the yarn because I think that's a really nice thing to do so hopefully that will be going out in the next couple of weeks so if you are interested in test knitting I will include a link in the description box below and then you can sign up to my pool of test knitters and then whenever I have a test knit opening you'll hear about it and you can apply and then you can test knit my design so you get early access to them and you can help me find any problems with them but they should all be tech edited by then so there shouldn't be too many problems. So here I'm scanning up my Mendip 4-ply Stormy base, this is the darker colour of the two bases so it's spun from the grey and the brown and occasionally black fleeces and so you get this beautiful heathered colour which is a natural mix of most of the Shetland shades except the white which goes into the white base. I currently scan everything by hand, I've got a big cone of yarn on the floor on a set of scales in front of me so I can keep track of how much the skein is going to weigh so I can make sure that each skein is going to be the correct weight. Obviously it's really inefficient to do everything by hand like this, it's quite slow and ends up wearing out my wrists quite a lot but it's what I've got at the moment, it doesn't cost me anything. I do need to look into getting possibly an electric scanner with a counter which will help not quite automate things but make things a bit faster so I spend less time just winding things round and round and round and we're getting to the end of the skein think it can be interesting for people to see the behind the scenes progress of things because sometimes you're not aware of the processes involved and I think it's nice to give people a little glimpse into that. So I've got the lovely skeins here, you can see it's this beautiful heathery texture where some of the darker fibres in there add a sort of tweedy effect which I really love. I've also got a couple of, well a few mini skeins so for dye baths going forwards I'm going to be offering mini skeins as well so I've got a few available in the shop and each time I do batches going forwards I'm going to offer them so the standard skeins are 50 grams and these ones are 10 and I think it'll just be really good for any kind of colour work like the and things where you might just want some for a contrasting collar or cuff or something, anything where you might just need a little bit because sometimes you don't need a full skein for things. You might have seen in the video where I was taking the yarn out of the dye water that there was still a little bit of yellow in the water. I always aim to exhaust my dye pot so if the yarn doesn't quite take all of the colour I dye up other things so I will just put things in the pot until all of the colour is gone. It's not the most precise way of doing things but I really like to have sort of one-off colours and things like that for my hand spun and my bats. So this is a pure BFL top so it's British Blue Face Leicester wool, it's not actually showing up very well there, it's a bit too bright for it I think, and I've also dyed up this is Blue Face Leicester blended with soy. Let's see if I can, there you go, so you can see the streaks of soy here add a really nice sort of glossy finish. I often use it instead of silk because I'm slightly strange about using silk, I just find it a weird way of processing fibre so I prefer to use vegetable fibres if possible. And so you can see those two against each other there and so these ones I will probably use in fibre bats which I will then either spin or sell as bats and in a bit I'm going to show you how I make fibre bats using different materials so a few different fibres that I've dyed up a while ago I think that'll be fun for you to see. So I'm here at my second desk, I have two desks, one is the one just over there which is where I have my computer and my second screen and it's where I do most of my computer work and it's usually full of mess, I mean to be honest everything here is usually full of mess. This desk it usually has a space on it with a white linen tablecloth which is where I do my photography, it's where I take most of my Instagram photos and things just because it's right by the window and I've got my daylight bulb lamp just up here which helps me get colour accuracy on my photos. It's also where I have my drum carder which is this just here and I'm going to show you a little bit about how I blend fibres to make into bats which can then be spun or felted or used in general fibre arts. So here in front of me I have the three fibres I'm going to blend that I have dyed at various points. First up we've got this gorgeous let's see this alpaca so it's naturally a grey alpaca it's which I've then over dyed in sort of reds and yellows and oranges but the grey sort of brings out this almost maroony shade but then there's there are all these little like flecks of brighter colour and I just I it's not the softest alpaca but it's just got a gorgeous gorgeous texture to it which I love. I've used this I mean I've had this fleece for a couple of years because most of my raw fibre I take direct from whole fleeces. I believe this alpaca was called Billy I suspect he's still called Billy I don't know. So yeah that's the first one I like these little little locks you get that almost look like claws or flames or something. So there's that one then next up is this lighter oh got a bit of another one in there this lighter wool. I probably dyed these at the same time because it looks like the same dye back to me and dye batch to me can't guarantee that though. So this is Shetland Tees water wool which I get from Fernhill Farm where I also do a little bit of work for them with their wool business. This is these are sort of the leftovers because I with this this fleece it's got some gorgeous locks in it which you can see some of here. I don't know if you can see that there it's really nice and squiggly I don't think it's gonna focus. But what I do is I tend to pick out the really nice locks and I go through and I sort them all by hand and I sell those as they are because sometimes you know the the colour graduation you get on each bit of fibre is often amazing. And so these are sort of the leftovers the bits that didn't quite go into nice neat locks. There are little squiggly bits but and so I use these for blending into bats which I'll then either sell as bats or I'll spin into yarn. And then the next one is this gorgeous sort of mango sorbet colour kid mohair and I think that the camera always struggles a bit with mohair especially in light colours just because it's so glossy like I don't know if that'll yeah see it looks really washed out there it's actually a very warm kind of it's a mangoy colour it's it's an orangey yellow it's kid mohair so it's very very fine it's gorgeously lustrous and this this isn't actually direct from a fleece I bought this just as a quantity of kid mohair. Often with these ones the ones that are just a solid colour like this one so the others had colour variation in them this one I believe would have been a leftover dye vat so when I dye yarn or other things if the dye doesn't exhaust completely because sometimes a little bit imprecise with quantities I always just chuck in some extra fibre to use up the the dye that didn't exhaust to make sure that when I'm finished dyeing there's no colour left in the water so then that can just be poured away. Often I'll neutralise it and use it on the garden it has to be neutralised because I use citric acid to set the dyes and you don't want to be pouring acid all over your garden because well there are acid loving plants but I don't think I have many of them. So yeah I'm going to be blending these I will I'll show you a little bit of how I do it I'm not sure if the camera angle is going to work but we'll give it a try. So I've got my carder set up here I've got my fibres here I have to keep a margin here so that the fibres don't get caught up in the mechanism here you can see it happens a little bit there I try to keep that cleaned out so that it doesn't get all gacky but yeah so I'm just going to show you how I start carding up some vats so usually I just this is going to make some horrible noise by the way I might have to sort of mute it while I'm winding the card around because it's it's just the most disgusting noise and it kind of makes me wish I could listen to music whilst doing it I might have to headphone up in the future but yes. So I'm just selecting little bits I'm not being particularly picky I'm just grabbing a little bit at a time and then I just blend them in chunks and I like to get a good distribution of each fibre but I don't want them blended too carefully because I really like the contrast of the colours and the way that little bits of each show up and it's not just like a uniform blend. So now the card is struggling a bit to get round and there's a lot of fibre coming off here I get a lot of the mohair coming off on the front wheel which is meant to remove the any sort of waste and shorter fibres the mohair is a bit fine so sometimes it doesn't like to catch this doesn't go to waste I scrape it all off and I put it into my little bag of carding waste which when I've got enough I blend it all together and sometimes I'll spin that up and sometimes I'll give them to people and so I'm going to remove the bat off the top one here now if this were the final bat I'd roll it up as I take it off the carder because I find that quite a neat way to do it but I'm going to blend this one again just to get like a little bit more uniformity so what I do is I take it off the carder I'll blend the rest of that into bats and then I'll sort of tear them all into pieces and then blend them together again just to get uniformity across all the bats so you end up with slightly less sort of smaller chunks of varying texture in each one that's that there that's how that comes off I think that's looking really beautiful sort of reminds me of rocks in the desert or something where you get a lot of mineral deposits like iron oxide and things I love that so here I've got my bats that have come off the carder after the first round of carding I've got three here so as you can see there are big chunks of each type of fiber in there as you can see that's a big bit of mohair there and lots of alpaca here so I'm going to be blending these together I've weighed them and I've got 118 grams total so I'm actually going to split them into four bats so what I do now is basically I just tear them into pieces this bit's always super satisfying just ripping up the thing you've spent a while doing and then I will take those pieces and I'll put them into piles that come to about 30 grams each I'm expecting to lose a bit more weight just as waste this is how much carding waste came off in the first round so that'll go in my nice waste box so I'll lose a bit more so I'll probably end up with four bats of about 25 grams each so that'll be 100 grams total so I'm just going to make these into little piles I'm not going to show you that because it's going to be very boring just trying to put them on the scales to make sure that each little pile comes to about 30 grams and then I'll blend them all up together now I've got my little heap of torn up bats so these are approximately 30 grams and I'm just going to blend these together there we go you can see that was much quicker than blending the fibres together the first time around because this time I don't have to pick and choose and it's much easier going so this time I'm going to roll it off like this I don't do this too precisely because I figure a lot of the time people are going to want to do their own thing with it anyway and I'll probably have to unroll it to photograph it that's coming off really really nicely it's looking beautiful and there we go so that's all ready for spinning or some people use them for felting or I'm not sure what other people use them for and so I'll do that three more times and then they'll go on the shop once I've photographed them thank you so much for watching I hope you found everything interesting and enjoyable I know there are lots of podcasts out there so I'm really honoured that you've made it all the way through this one and do let me know if you have any feedback or comments or questions or anything you'd like me to talk about in future episodes you can leave a comment here or send me a message on Instagram or Facebook or email me I just love to hear from people so until next time