Open Day at the Natural Dye Studio..................

This weekend was the open weekend at the Natural Dye Studio over in Suffolk.
It was an early start picking up the first contingent in Richmond at 8:15 am ready to circumnavigate the A406, otherwise known as the North Circular. Riding shotgun were, Socktopus, Indieknits, Dianemullholland, Larissa, Froggy and I was driving. First meet up was outside Starbucks so we could make sure we were set up for the day then it was off to find Borders at Brent Cross and then Silver Street Station. The journey up was going to take around three hours.

Well the pick ups went fairly smoothly with only one slight variation to the location of Silver Street Station care of Google maps, for some reason only known to them they chose to locate it in the middle of a housing estate. Anyway without too much trouble we located Larissa and we were off.

We finally arrived at the Natural Dye Studio at around 11:45 to shouts of, "Is the BBQ on yet, I'm starving."

I finally got to meet Andy of Bluefaced.com face to face rather than just through Ravelry and also the lovely Jenni of Fyberspates who had some of the most lucious yarn called scrumptious, it truly was.

So straight into the shop for a look around and some purchases ......










Look at all those lovely socks and yarn, I just stood there staring and druelling, how do you even begin to choose when all the yarn is that delicious.

Well I did manage to find a few things to buy like this little lot......



Yes that is roving in there, and no I don't spin, well not yet anyway, Diane has promised to get me started. It looked so lovely and was so soft I thought it would be a great mini project for summer.


This is the scrumtious that I bought from Jenni and I am going to use it to make Hey Teach from this months Knitty summer surprise patterns. I so adored Sarah's that she is wearing in this picture. It's the little lacey number in red,she's the one standing up.



After some initial purchases, some chatting, knitting and some burgers it was time to pop off to the dyeing room and watch the demo's from Amanda and Jenni. Apologise I forgot to take my camera in for this bit but Indieknits has some great photos on her blog which you can look at here.

I did get one of the dyeing room though......



It was fascintating to watch the process and then see the end resulting yarn.

The yarn hanging out here to dry is the yarn from the dyeing demo which both Alice and I fell in love with and insisted to Amanda that she let us buy it and take it home wet!



Here it is wound up once it was dry.......



And again after I re-skeined it this morning to separate out some of the fibres....



It's a beautiful blend of alpaca, silk and cashmere, all my three favourite yarns in one. That's probably why I also bought a skein in laceweight.



We had a really fantastic day and it was great to go with such a fab bunch of friends, it made the 6 hour round trip worth every minute. I finally arrived home at 10:25pm. Thank you everyone for a great day.