How Cool is this?

I started the new socks.

Then my sweetie took me on a road trip and I found a cool thermometer for the green house which marks the highest and lowest temps. This should help to start pinning down plant starting timing, or if I need any heating aids in there.

I also found a store with some plain white superwash sock yarn and I bought a couple of skeins to play with. I knew I should wait a bit, but I couldn't. Playing with colour is far too exciting and intriguing to let plain white skeins sit in a bag, which with my recent track record, I'd just misplace anyway.

So I broke out some more modern dyes and went at a bit of vat/kettle dyeing.

How cool are the results?

I had to force myself to set the skeins aside and finish up the "other" socks first before I start another pair. Otherwise for certain I'd have a single orange striped sock sitting around making me feel guilty everytime I looked at it.. for years! Anyway... yummy varigated colours and I can't wait to see how it knits up for more socks!
Of course there are a half dozen things I should be doing first, not to mention finishing up that first pair of socks.


Needing some colour to spin, I dug out some previously dyed madder fleece. Generally, I prefer dyeing yarn, but I had way too much colour and not enough yarn. The problem is that I didn't get all the madder out of it and it was a tad sticky, so there may have been a bit of lanolin left in it. The risk of felting while rinsing can increase when one gets the urge to smoosh, swirl, wiggle, flip or perform some other sort of agitation in hurrying the rinsing process. It took another 3 or 4 rinses to get the water to run clear and I stayed well away from the fibre in the process. After it drained, I lay it out on a towel in front of the fire to dry. Isn't it pretty?
It was still a tad damp when I went to bed, so I set a towel on it, to act as a cat deterrent. The cat will sit on dry fibre but I've not seen him snuggle up to covered fibre. I figured I was pretty safe. The next day my son congratulated me on making such a nice cat bed!
Now I get to do alot of combing and prepping before I can run the fibre through the drum carder.


Garden update - seeds are ordered - plans are being made - I'll replace the herb garden I left at the old house and plant a new dye garden, with a few more varities of dye plants in it. The rest will be veggies. I'll start redoing the perennial beds to have plants and flowers that I like. Right now the main bed has lots of low growing non-flowering green stuff, some oriental poppies and a bit of golden rod. The rest around the house has hostas, hostas, hostas and lots of what I'm told is Euronymus......... and...........weeds............. lots.............and...........lots..........of..............weeds.