My Retinas Are Dying!

My Aunts in Taiwan wear incredible clothes: highly textured, like something out of an infant's touch and feel book, trim, feathers and rhinestones. Sequins are beloved. And color, My God. My partner (I think he will be known as Mr. Partner since he's always thought it weird that I've called him that) so, Mr. Partner and I decided that this desire for insane clothing is something that often happens with the onset of age. My coolest cousin wore only black until her 30s and then she started showing up in BRIGHT green sweaters and red framed sunglasses. I thought this change in her was odd and then I looked at her mother and it seemed apparent that it was just a part of the natural process of aging. And my cousin is Cool in her red glasses don't get me wrong, she is freaking gorgeous and her snot is way hipper than my best fantasy of myself.

In any case, Mr. Partner decided that as you grow older your retinas die and you need brighter and brighter colors in order to see. Or maybe to feel whole. I don't know. For me, I need them to feel whole. Still, when we see very colorful folks walking around we often feel the need to shriek, "MY RETINAS ARE DYING!" Mine died long ago, when I learned to knit:

Poor Baby J's retinas. His must be on total overload, maybe that is why he is such a hurricane. I'm overstimulating him with my desire for bright colors. The hat was my first attempt at navajo plying and it was spun from pollwarth roving dyed in the "parrot" colorway, from Deep Color. I don't know where Claudia got it from and I don't know who dyed it, it is definitely done with synthetic dyes. And the sweater is malabrigo, a cardigan knitted all in garter stitch and in a one piece.

And I have to post this picture. This was taken at the Discovery Museum in Saucilito. My four year old picked out his own outfit. He has been so butch all these years. Just recently we've had a break in that ice. This is his "dancer" dress up. I have to tell you that I love it! I've waited for him to be excited about something that isn't stereotypically masculine for so long now. He is a typical boy obsessed with superheros, swords and racecars, but now he also proudly wears a princess pageant dress and will beat the hell out of you if you try to tell him that your dress is prettier than his. I'll take what I can get. I just enjoyed the fact that my two kids were probably the most oddly dressed in the entire museum that day.

And does this look green to you? Because sometimes it looks green to me and sometimes it looks like some other weird color, never before seen. The off green. It was the garden dyed yellow romney and dipped once in indigo. It is a very different green than the osage overdyed with indigo. I'll have to put them both together for a better look.

And Indigo. I feel closer to whole.

Dyeing Success Smells Sweet

Really it does. Because this merino top smells vaguely of honey.


As does this roving. This is more of the Fletcher/Suri Alpaca blend I got from Homestead. And its SO beautiful even my partner thought it was neat. And that is rare because he is not a fiber afficionado. He is more of a motorcycle and broken retro dishwasher kind of guy.

The flower dyebath pales next to the osage extract. Its something I'd pick out for myself to wear and the osage is something I'd pick out if I were knitting for my kids. One of the my favorite things about natural dyeing is that the palette is managed for the dyer, just about everything comes out tasteful and wearable. Its so hard to go wrong!

Now for the green:

I like it. The effect of overdyeing with indigo is so complicated. It looks handpainted and there is a lot of variance in this 2 oz top, mossy to darker blue green at the bottoms (where the indigo drips from while hanging) and the overall effect is a "bottle green" as the earth hues dye manual suggests it will be. It also suggests dyeing with indigo, then mordanting and finally dyeing with osage. I imagine a more solid and even color could be achieved with this method. I might have to give it a try, although Claudia at Deep Color always taught us the method I used. And she always has her reasons as I'm learning.

I was careful this time with my dipping. Like I said, I had just added more stock and I kept the dip shorter and didn't over dip this time. Last time I got a little over zealous with the dipping and in my hope of locking the color in I squashed my beautiful yellow.

I left some of this original osage roving undipped to see the two together. Quite honestly I'm not sure if I find much harmony in this. Of course, I'm trying to see past it to the spun and then possibly knit phase. I could dip the other yellow part and I might after I look and think a while longer.

Tomorrow I am going to Walden Center School, in Berkeley to teach spinning to some of the kids there. They are 8 and 9 years old I think. They have been doing amazing weavings and have washed and carded some of their own wools already. They also made CD drop spindles and are ready to spin now I hear. We'll see what happens! I'm sure they will be great, I'm not so sure about me. There is such a huge leap from knowing how to do something to being able to teach it to people. This is something I'd love to get into though. I would LOVE to do this with my own kids someday, taking them to a farm or wool festival and having them wash small amounts of wool and then kool aid or natural dye it and do the whole process! So far Super M enjoys treadling my wheel as fast as he can-to the point where he seems ready to spin cotton. And Baby J likes disassembling the wheel when I'm not looking, rocking locks on his little baby sized rocking chair or hitting his big brother on the head with a drop spindle. You have to start somewhere.

Overdyeing Again and Again

I went for green again and dyed this Romney top (from my cousin-in-law's New Zealand farm) with a high concentration of Earth hues osage extract. The yellow came out great and brilliant as before. I'm so sad that you can't currently get osage from them, I have one 2 oz bottle left now.

After some fussing and some frustration, leading to two days of neglect and my indigo pot was ready. It was such a thrill because I hadn't touched the pot in a while and it went off and turned very blue. No amount of thioria dioxide was going to help it out, I added a bit but to no avail. I guessed the ph was off and added some lye. I fretted a while and eventually left the pot in disgust. Apparently, when it comes to indigo, this is like yelling at the TV or kicking the car and getting it to work. Walk away for days and the surface turns a lovely yellow/green that means you are ready to dye! If you scrape the top with a spoon you would see more of the greenish color.

Osage + Indigo = Bottle Green. At least, that is what my earth hues natural dye extract manual says. What do you think? I think came out lovely this time! I dipped it fairly quickly (there was a lot of stock in there this time due to my prolonged tinkering with the pot) and I think I managed to come out with a lovely green. This 2 oz bit of top I dipped fully and another one I dipped only sections, so there is the original osage color and green overdyed. These are taking forever to dry since its been raining on and off here for weeks now.

Super M is always complaining about the indigo these days, "I want you to take the indido out of here Mom." "I can STILL smell the indido!" I try telling him that it just smells blue and he both confused and offended by this and tells me, "No it DOESN'T! It smells STINTY!" Which is how he says stinky. Yesterday he told me it smelled like cookies, I think it was these:

Mexican sun plants, coreopsis and sunflower. I dead headed these this past summer and froze them. I still have a few more baggies but this is most of it. I was decidedly unscientific about it and just weighted equal amounts dyestuff to fiber by the feel of it. I saved the remaining dye bath (to which I added the left over osage dye baths-that was a LOT of osage!) Cooking these made the sweetest smell of chamomile like tea. I yummy, apetizing aroma for a change! The remaining rovings are drying outside and it was too wet to lay out the locks I dyed with them. Its supposed to rain again tomorrow so I don't know when those will see the sun. The colors are more muted and don't scream quite as loudly as the osage. The yellows are more of what you would expect from a natural dye stuff, soft and quiet and utterly wearable. They smell vaguely sweet and tea like as well.

Let me Count the Ways

Continuing my ode to Homestead Wool and Gift Farm, here is some more fiber from them: Rambouillet from sheep named, Flash. It has a tight but disorganized crimp, typical Rambouillet from what I read. This is my first go with this type of fleece. The locks were dyed by Sandy in colors she called Shifting Sands. Mostly pale greens and tans with some hints of orange or yellow in places. Its so sproingy. I started spinning a 2 ply worsted weight yarn with it using a long draw with handcarded rolags. I gave these bits to my mom and she started her usual garter stitch scarf. Its coming out So Beautiful! I am amazed how great it looks knitted up, I'll have to try to get a picture of it if I can get it away from her. She needed more so I started picking through more locks and running them through the drum carder. This is what I came up with when trying to separate the browns and greens distinctly.


I pulled out some batts that my 4 year old, to be known as Super M, helped me run through the carder. These we just put in what he wanted so its a mix of the colors. I've spun this yarn on a wheel and lately, here and there on my Schaact hi-lo spindle. Its a really nicely balanced spindle and a joy to spin with, I've only spun it as a top whorl so far.

Starting clockwise at the top right, more fibers I've got from Sandy: white 50% Fletcher (a merino cross) 50%suri alpaca, black suri alpaca, 50% Rita (merino) 50%black alpaca, white balls of pure Rita, auburn suri alpaca, Flash locks. Look at the contrast of texture and color, and all natural undyed! Oh, to have a full day to sit in this pile and play.

Another look at the playsilks Courtney and I dyed with indigo and food dyes:

I did another dip on most of these, one I left the lighter blue. I hope her daughter liked them!

Indigo Playsilks

A friend let slip that she was natural dyeing playsilks for her daughter for Christmas. She was using only food dyes for the most part, coffee, spinach, raspberry zinger tea, turmeric, etc. So, of course, I offered some indigo from my pot! We rushed it a lot since it was my baby's naptime, and she had an hour and a half before she had to get her kids. I did one dip on each of these silks, one was dyed with turmeric, another with coffee (it started out as a nice tan color) and the others were white.

I will try one more short dip on one of the plain white silks and see how it looks but we are going for nice light or bright blues. The blues are mottled throughout the fabric and the effect looks like a blue/white sky. The coffee overdyed silk looks almost turquoise and we liked that one among the best.

Will I ever get a true green from overdyeing?

What is up with this stained, muddy looking color?! I feel like I took her beautiful sunshine yellow and wiped muddy floors with it. Sorry Courtney! We'll see how much rinses out and what the final result is.

Natural Dye Class Results

I took a natural dye class at Deep Color Studio, my favorite place on earth, and these were my results from the April class. Above is the indigo and overdyed indigo we did. We handpainted one roving, (top left) and I didn't particularly like how mine came out, so I overdyed it. I overdyed my yellow that was dyed with fustic. I don't think I used enough to make a really bright yellow so who knows how this supposed green will come out when I finally wash these rovings. Since the indigo pot is going now I decided these needed a few more dips. I love the color they are now and to keep them this way I think they will need two to three more dips. I am totally guessing, I know you are supposed to dye 2-3 shades darker than you want the final color to be. My first piece of felt is also in the top corner of this picture, it was a white corriedale square and now it is a blue corriedale square. Wow, right?

Our instructor, Claudia, also let us dye some of our own handspun in the class so I stuck these in: more 2 ply Merino and a thick and thin single. These will need several dips, I think they only got two fast ones at the end of the class. Indigo has a smell that is somewhere between a rotten egg and burning rubber. Something like you might imagine The Bog of Eternal Stench to smell like. In fact, I think indigo dyeing arose of bogs in some places; something about things being dropped in the bog and coming out green and then turning blue when they hit the air. In any case, to me it smells rare and blue. Its all terribly Eye of Newt, there is the big pot over the fire, (no bubbling allowed though!) the finicky & fermenting ingredients, the magic of color change from yellow/green to deep blue and, of course, enter me-the bedraggled hag with rubber gloves.

Cochineal, Cochineal, madder and cochineal/fustic/madder mixed. Now that is an imaginative title for this shot. The mix is the pink. Although at the time I was convinced that the pink was somehow the madder and the orange the mix. I was absolutely certain that there had been some amazing weirdness that happened to produce this result. Of course, it was my own incredible ability to mislabel. So, this was the other portion of our class. We did some dyeing with natural dye extracts (the indigo was also an extract) and we ground the cochineal bugs in a coffee grinder (I didn't do this but I did get two bright red bundles of fiber out of it) and got this fabulous red with it. Claudia recommended that we not overdye these, they would have been a beautiful purple I think but she said that this red was a special treat for natural dyers since this level of brilliance is so costly that we would probably not dye like this again on our own. I am not super into the whole idea of grinding bugs up but I am into red. I've tried for red with madder but haven't had luck with consistent results, haha, welcome to natural dyeing I suppose. I am going to try a purely cold dyed madder with the fiber left to mordant for a long time and then a long, long soak in a high concentration of madder. I hope this will get me something more red! I know it will be a yellow/red and not a blue/red but I can live with that. Cochineal, I suppose its not much different than silk. I wish they could just find the already dead bugs and grind those! Wouldn't that be nice?! Like road kill cochineal, you know? At this point in time I not totally comfortable with buying farmed bugs to mash up but I am happy to hang onto this bright red goodness for now.

Indigo and overdyeing


Here is a first dip of a small handwashed, carded and spun skein of Merino and some Merino roving. I'm not sure how many dips I've got planned for this wool, I'll probably do a range between four and ten to see what the variations are.

The osage and indigo are supposed to come out "bottle green" and the osage made a nice, strong yellow so I'm hoping for a clear green on these. I'm not sure if I'll do the same amount of dips for all three pieces of roving or try for a little variance. I think I might spin it as a single and ply it with a single of indigo dyed merino. I'm not sure yet. Its not as fine as the Merino I have so I'm still deciding what to do with it.

Here are all the handspun skeins lined up. And my the shadow of my pinky. Who knew my pinky did that when I took pictures. Its kind of regal don't you think? Again, the overdyed skein is at the top the the middle two skeins have had three dips and the bottom skein one.

I'm also spinning away those madder locks. I'm hand carding them a little at a time and then spinning them up on the Schaact. Some of the tips are a little felted but this is from the intensive washing I had to give them to get the notorious Merino grease out. Actually, I think I was rushed along during the washing process by my kids. (I've since learned to time things carefully, I can only do fibery things when they are both asleep. So, never-haha!) The felting is easily dealt with as I just save the locks for some later felting project. I am into the madder right now since I am reading The Root of Wild Madder. Its great, its the first real book I've read in a long time and I'm enjoying it. I like seeing all the shades from the same dyestuff and thinking about how its going to look plied and then knitted. I like the harmony that you arrive at so easily with natural dyes. And I like that garish is a near impossibility. I think that should be a seductive incentive for any beginning dyer.