Here and there

Realizing that I have yet to finish washing all the colored Romney I bought from Homestead, I embarked once more. I'm almost done with Carl now, the last of the sheep I've got to bathe. His locks are varied, some are dark brown (these parts have some more neps) and others are filled with greys. Card a little, spin a little is the recipe for happiness with these. Looking at the silvery locks spun up I think they could be pretty overdyed. I've been wanting to overdye some light brown and grey yarn. I think can finish the rest in one more batch. Then I have only a little more unwashed suri alpaca to tackle.





Decidedly NOT natural dyed is this green yarn. I spun this from some hand dyed top I traded for with Jacey of Insubordiknit last summer. I started spinning it without a plan, for the love of green, and it sat for a while neglected. I picked it up again just wanting to finish it off and spun the rest fairly differnetly than I had begun it, resulting in some highly twisted parts and some loftier low twist sections. It was total Project Runway spinning, a combination effort of spinning while watching seasons 3 and 4-damn you Heidi! That is my excuse. But, I think its going to be totally pretty knit up! The lofty little poofs always look pretty in stockinette. I'm thinking of making my own Johnny Depp tribute hat. (You've got to scroll near to the bottom-but its a totally fun read all the way down.) I don't know if I could rock this green of a hat, maybe if I got the aviator glasses to go with it. Fierce? Or insane? Maybe somewhere in between.


Redeeming itself from the last photo is the light purple from the first logwood purple. Here it is washed, and feeling fluffier.
Fustic in back and pomegranate in front.


Wattle in back and madder in front.
Logwood purple and logwood greys. This is 3 separate tops braided together. The logwood grey has a very purple tinge. I LOVE these. And I'm not one of those purple people.
More rescue roving, this is the border leister/suri alpaca, I think the top is pomegranate (I know! Its awful-I lost track, but it might come to me.) And the bottom is madder, the light doesn't do these justice, they look much more similar than they are.
Finally, more quebracho red, the 3rd bath and I think we got what we could from it. This is corriedale/suri alpaca. I'm going to pair this with the same fiber dyed with wattle.

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.

Madder Yarn and More Fleeces

This little skein went to my awesome sister-in-law's mom. She is always making beautiful things for my niece, either crochet or sewn. I thought she might be able to make a small project, a hat or something with this. It began with white Merino and Cormo fleece from Merry Meadows farm in Willits, CA, washed and handcarded by me then natural dyed with madder.

I think the plying angle is too tight on this yarn, it was spun so very long ago (this last summer) that I can't remember what my excuse would be, treadling on too much caffiene? Spinning while enraged? Oh well, I'm sure it was a good one.

Onto new possibilities! Pinto huacaya alpaca! I haven't spun it in forever but alpaca was my favorite fiber for a long time. This is my first go round at preparing the fleece, I got a bunch of it from Sandy at Homestead Wool and Gift Farm. My favorite all time farm for the farmer's sweetness and philosophy. Oh, and the wool! Its all amazing! And did I tell you I won a raffle there this past summer? I never will raffles and yet, even you, who think you will never win raffles and can manage to do such things at her farm. I have a fantasy that someday she'd let me visit and that I would finally learn to take all the beautiful pictures that I see in my head and my kids and I would meet her sheep and I would have a wall in my home of framed/matted pictures of her sheep and my kids and all the things I love. Ah, how I'd love to meet her sheep, particularly Rita and Fletcher. I should write a separate post about my infatuation with Rita.

Didn't I say onto the possibilities? Below is the washed pinto alpaca, it is so soft and I'm not sure what to do with it exactly. Its one of those things that I love so much that I just must hoard for a while. I wanted to blend these fibers with something else but I don't know if I can bring myself to dilute that color. I can't get over the dark brown, so rich, like a well polished wood.

And black! Rare black! Sandy shared this with me and I feel a little guilty that I am again robbing her personal shelves. But she is generous one and did give it of her own free will. The locks are long, over 5 inches it looks to be. I should measure, I don't know if this will give me any trouble going through the drum carder. I had the idea that I'd make myself some merino/alpaca batts with natural colors. Only one way to (carefully) find out.

And more colors! A fawn and a darker chestnut colored alpaca. The black and brown tones are Suri alpaca. I've washed the pinto and the black. I've got to get into the other colors now. Its been so rainy that there's been no place to dry anything so I've take a break from fleece washing.

The other thing I need to finish washing is my colored romney. I have ten pounds of this. Its so beautiful but sometimes I don't know what I am thinking. I think I was thinking a felt rug, but I've gone back on this idea to a woven rug. Now, if only I knew how to weave on that loom I have upstairs.

This is from a sheep named Carl and is freshly washed and drying on my very professional drying rack. Is there anything more satisfying than freshly washed wool that is still just a bit damp?

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.