A customer brought by Show & Tell on Friday. She knit this lovely bias knit cowl using an original Silk Garden (by Noro) that grades with a long repeat thru various colors, along with a Silk Garden Solo (solid color).  

It reminded me of the bias knit scarf Chris knit this spring for a store model to show off the Gradient Zauber Perlens we stock at the store - another way of using a gradient with a solid color (in the scarf we chose a skein of Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock) for a simple but really pleasing pattern.

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And although we have a Shibori Workshop planned for the weekend of Sept 23 and 24th, we don't have any more Natural Dye classes planned. But....I wanted to share a spectacular color that we got using lichen on Sunday! Our family had a summer camp on Lake Sebago Maine for generations until the generations just got too widespread and upon my moms death a few years back, the camp was gifted to a boys camp that shared the same private cove we enjoyed for almost a century! Anyway, after a rain and wind storm there, we would walk the wooded path along the point and collect mammulata lichen that had fallen off the boulders during the storm.  This dye bath represents the last of the lichen we collected there and the color is magnificent, so I wanted to share. 

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For those of you who do natural dyeing, you should never pick the the healthy lichen off a rock. It can take almost 40 years for them to grow and they represent a symbiotic relationship that is important to respect. But after a wind or heavy rain storm, any lichen that fall off the rocks are fair game for dyeing! The were weak/dead to begin with and that's why they couldn't hang on. Creating a dye bath from them requires lots of stirring/agitation to introduce oxygen over the course of a several month soak in ammonia!