Saturday 20 August 2011

My Heart Exposed Yarns (round 14)



My two beautiful daughters Angelica, Imogen and I felt quite emotional making the natural dyes for the round 14 samples last month, picking various things from the garden to use and setting the dye vats on their way to transform into beautiful colours for you in the garden. Collecting the rain water to use for the painting was easy because for the first two weeks in August here in the north east, it didnt stop raining, we even had thunderstorms and brilliant clashes of lightening.

The hand painted samples pictured above are the last ones we can ever produce from our own plants here in the north east region of the UK because in just three weeks our family is moving to the south east, over 320 miles away and the new garden is completely bare of all vegetation so we'll be starting again almost from scratch. We are taking cuttings of our favourite dye plants in the hope these will continue to thrive but for now here are a couple of photos showing just a few of the special ingredients we used to make your Fibreholics sample :



As with all our fibres, each one has a purple ribbon with small silver heart charm attached as a little keepsake thank you from us for choosing our fibres, each one is individually wrapped in clear plastic wrap so you dont need to unwrap your fibre until you want to use it (unless your like me and cant stop stroking them that is).

There are four sets of colours in this round, I cant wait to see your photographs to see which one arrives in your samples collection.

For those of you living within travelling distance of sunny Kent, we will be hosting a meet up afternoon at some point just after Christmas, it would be very lovely to put a face to your name so if you can make it over to meet the MHE family that would be fantastic, make sure you join our ravelry group MHE Friends Group to keep a look out for the announcement early in the new year, I also post regular discount codes there so keep an eye on the discount message thread too.

Al our love,
Helen, Angelica and Imogen
find us on facebook and pop in to say "Hi"

Friday 12 August 2011

The Next Round

I'm a new contributor for this round of Fibreholics and I'm just bagging up my fibres to send up to Carol so I thought I'd show you a sneak peek of what might be in your bag for the next round. I specialise in blends of fibres, some I blend on a hackle to make a length of roving that's really nice to spin because drafting is so easy. I also make batts, some in 100g lots, but I also do a merino, shetland, nylon blend (would be great as fibre for socks but could be for other things) in 35g batts to make 3 ply yarn with a different colour as each ply.

So here's what's going in-

DSCF3695

Some smaller samples of rovings I've blended recently, some smaller batts, a couple of chunks of naturally dyed fibre, and some mini versions of my pick n' mix batts. The next round is due to go on sale at the start of September.
If you want to take a closer look, and see if you can work out what you might be getting then you can take a look at my shop here-
http://www.etsy.com/shop/hilltopcloud