Colours out of my kitchen

 I've been dyeing. 

  This is a commercial white tweedy bit that was an awfully, stark shade of white.   I've not yet found a project that particular shade of white worked with, so each time, I dyed it.  I'd bought 10 or 15 balls on super sale.  The last two balls were turned into large skeins, tied with 4 ties and ceremonially dumped into a pot of grey weak acid dye.  I used a 1% dye stock with vinegar as my acid.   It's still wet here, but it turned out perfectly.


This is fibre reactive dyes on superwash Merino.   The brightness of the colours always bring me joy.  I learned to dye wool with fibre reactive dyes, using a 2% stock solution.  The last time I mixed up dyes, I'd just done new acid dyes at 1% and did the same with the fibre reactive dyes.   However, what I found was gorgeous colours on wool, that exhausted, rather than leaving excess dye to wash out.  I'll need to explore this more.

 I was using up the last of a batch of red acid dye.  I was actually hoping for a graduation of reds to purples, ending in blue, but the red seemed to strike immediately, in my blends and the result was lots of reds and pinks, and lots of purplish blues.   The colour breaking/striking fast was my fault as I'd inadvertently poured in too much vinegar and pre-heated the water I was using.  It's pretty though.  It will likely spin up to be quite purpley.



 
 Pumpkin coloured acid dyes on superwash Merino mill ends.   In the pot, this was gorgeous.   However, despite getting it to temperature for more than enough time, when I rinsed it,  yellow dye kept running off.  I put it back in the pot, with more vinegar, brought it up to temperature, kept it there for an hour again.  Despite the dye pot water exhausting, it still ran yellow when rinsed.   I tried one more time, dumping in a whole whack load of vinegar.   I heated it for almost 2 hours.   So far it seems okay, but it's lost those lovely variations in colour and the oranges of sort of melded into one shade.

 Speaking of orange - gratuitous photo of a lounging Phil.  He can be very vocal and pushy when he wants to be petted.   He has a much nicer coat, after a year of decent food.  When he adopted us and we let him in the house, he had almost no undercoat. I don't think he would have survived the winter outside.   He would sleep under the covers on the very cold evenings.   He still does like a cuddle on cooler days.

This is on my Minstrel right now.  It's jelly bean or ju jube coloured merino/cashmere blend.   It's spinning beautifully.  I'm trying to decide if I want to ply it with itself, or spin up some navy blue for plying...

End of Summer Colours

 Fall crocuses.  They are beautiful.   If I could get all the goldenrod out of the front flower beds, I'd divide up the 2 patches to make a bigger impact with that lovely pale pinky colour.

 Our property is surrounded by grazing meadows.  The horses only eat the grass.  The tall weeds take over and the farmer only seems to mow them down every couple of years.  Keeping the goldenrod under control is almost defeating.   They grow deep, huge roots that I can't get out, without help.   They are pretty, but overwhelming for sure.

I found these little pumpkins in the pumpkin raised bed.   After all the effort I put into controlling the mildew, I'd though there was no fruit for all that work.  However, there are 3 pumkins, albeit small ones.  They seem to be even smaller than pie pumpkins.  Next year, I'll order some hybrid seeds and plant a mildew resistant variety.  With the increase in hot, muggy weather, it will hopefully make a difference.  Maybe I'll just plant buttercup squash or something else though.   I've gotten complaints from the management that the pumpkin harvest isn't worth the effort I've been putting in.  When pie pumpkins go on sale in the fall, I can see his reasoning though -  more frozen pumpkin bang for the buck - literally last year as pie pumpkins were .99c a piece!

Plum jam - 8 jars
Tomatoes canned - 1 bushel - 45 jars
Corn frozen- 4 doz cobs, kernels cut off the cobs and frozen
320 yards plied of BFL

Dion, napping in a cat play tunnel, looking horribly cute.
 
The geese are migrating and many of them fly overhead.  Their voices are a sad sound this time of year, as it means summer is truly at an end.

Nothing on the Loom yet, BUT..........

I've been doing lots of cutting and pasting, and lots of spinning.  This is 198g of superwash merino.    I'm hoping I still have a bunch of the dark purple colour, with which to make stripey Hallowe'en socks.   I didn't get enough of the lime green, which would have been my first choice to go with the dark purple.   Then I'd have to make myself a black skirt, hat and maybe even a cape to go with the socks - just say'in ;)

The larger skein has 278 yards in it.  I didn't do the calculations for the slightly smaller skein for some reason. 

I'd been doing the good photographer thing, and I had a lovely reflective board to minimize the deep shadow when helper kitty Phil decided to help - I snapped the picture just as the board fell.  I decided not to try for another photo as Phil has been entirely too supervisory and unhelpful the last few days.

 This is some superfine hemp.  The sliver has lots of short bits and chaff in it.  Even the longest staples of this fibre are cut into much shorter lengths than I'd expected.   Hemp is a very tall plant.  It towers over tall men.  I'd anticipated that the fibres would be more flax strick like in length, rather than 3 and 4 inches long.   I should have asked questions before I bought 100 g of this stuff.  It looked so pretty on the display rack.  I found that when I put a bit too much twist into it, the thread snaps.   It holds together without a lot of twist though.   This sample still needs to be wet finished, but I need it for a display tomorrow, so that will have to wait.   I'm leaving the house at stupid early, so the samples will get packed tonight as I don't want to forget anything.

Currently on the loom is some lovely, shiny, blue bamboo.   It's just rayon - nothing special or eco wonderful or anything, but it's pretty and a nice interlude from spinning things like the hemp.  This flies off the fingers effortlessly.  It's pretty and once in a while I like to spin something pretty and interesting.  Most of the time, I don't mind natural colours and fibres, but there are always those ooh shiny moments.

I just spent somewhere between 30 and 40 hours making display backdrop boards for a guild outreach display, maybe even more hours than that.  You know, those science fair/4H club displays.   Because this is a non-selling event, I thought that just have a bunch of spinning and weaving on a table wouldn't draw people in.   This will hopefully do the trick.  In my mind, community outreach stuff should teach, explain, demonstrate or do something in addition to showing off what we do.  Our other outreach display stuff is packed away in someone's barn and not really accessible right now.

 I'm still looking for my show table cloth -  I've no idea where it is as those boxes are still not yet unpacked from - eek, I don't want to think how long, but not quite a decade at anyrate.  We didn't grab the bins of guild items that usually go to shows as not only are we not selling anything, but those of us who are lugging things for set up have smaller cars.   The guild cloths are in those bins.

We have a loom with our Fleece Festival class project on it for demonstrating and for people to try out.  Hopefully we'll fill up the last couple of spots by advertising it here.  I'm bringing my wheel, lots of spinning samples and some weaving bits and pieces.   We're displaying our new banner for the first time, with our sort of ugly new logo as well.   Pop by our booth and say hi if you're at the KW Knitter's Fair this weekend.