For Eleanor

... and our other Northern Hemisphere comrades - some of our summer warmth for your soul!

Love the determination of this guy - if you've ever biked on sand you'd know it's hard work, and he did it with a fishing rod!

Unfortunately I missed a horse and sulky riding by half an hour later because I was too busy knitting to notice until it had passed. I resolved to catch it on the return journey but was over the other side of the dunes photographing the hidden destruction a recent scrub fire had wrought on the regenerating dunes.

I smelt this fire when it was burning, one hot evening in town - luckily it was only a relatively small patch. Scrub fires seem to spring up from no-where when it reaches 29 C and Nor'West. I could see bits of plastic / glass bottles amongst the scorched earth - possibly the source of the ignition.

But it has been a fantastic summer so far!

Before and After

I like to dye variegated coloured fleeces for hand spinning (it's actually much easier to dye after spinning, which is what I did here). The natural variegation in the fleece (including the weathered tips) absorbs the dye differently, with the lighter colours in the fleece becoming much brighter than the darks, resulting in an interestingly variegated yarn with an often subtle hue - as if the fibre were stained rather than dyed. Naturally coloured fleeces dyed this way suggest what sheep might look like if they came in colours other than various shades of white, grey, brown and black.

This particular grey variegated Romney fleece turned out to be more than a little blah after washing and spinning. Below she holds approx 968 metres of spun Romney for her next winter jersey. I intended dying it anyway, but given how little variegation there was in the resulting spun yarn I may as well have got it machine washed and carded instead of doing it all myself.

Before

And after

I was very surprised at how difficult it was to get this fibre to uptake dye. The commercial yarn I used to tie the skeins dyed very well and are absolutely saturated with colour, and is no doubt superwash treated, which always enables dye penetration. Still, I cooked this stuff for almost two hours and the resulting colour is more of a stain than a deeply saturated dye colour - which is quite nice nonetheless, like a naturally blue sheep might look, wandering about the hills.

The dyed colour is hard to capture, somewhere between these two blues - a light charcoal-navy, with a slight variegation in colour as the lighter shades in the fleece dyed a brighter shade of blue. At least it will be robust and snuggly warm ... and a unique colour. I'm thinking Blank Canvas, and a bit of FairIsle, for interest.

Finally, some summertime warmth for the frozen Northerners out there. Yesterday's lunchtime view from the Crater Rim of Banks Peninsula. Having a blast on Instagram (which I might admit suits me better than blogging)