Sunday, April 10, 2016

Return of the Blog

Changing over from a PC to a Mac last year did a major number on this blog.  I have only now been able to repair it and continue.  Apple does not necessarily play nicely with Google.

I attempted a madder dye vat about a month ago, hoping a spell of warm weather would result in a good day for dyeing.  The madder root went into warm water to soak about five days ahead of dye day.  I mordanted the wool in preparation.  A couple of fiber friends wanted to watch the process and we made arrangements. Alas, when the dye day arrived (a Sunday morning) a cool wind had arrived also.  The madder did not come out as dark as I would like, although the fiber is easy to draft and spin.  Depending on the plied result, I may re-dye the yarn skeins this summer.

In the meantime, I decided to organize and label my handspun and hand dyed yarn stash.  It was spilling out into my studio work area.  I have gifted some of the skeins in the past, but only selected ones that I thought someone might particularly like.  So, I pulled everything off the shelves and out of the cabinet onto the floor.

I have some jewel colors.  I have some bright colors.







I have big skeins and small sample skeins.  I have over 50, probably close to 60, skeins.  Mostly wool, but some silk blends and some super wash with nylon.  In all, representing a lot of spinning and dyeing. With a deep sigh, I plunged in to sort, measure, weigh, and label.  The singles skein on the top left of the left photo was dyed with Kool-Aid.  That was a fun project although it was difficult to find the unsweetened Kool-Aid mix.

These skeins do not include the fiber that I have dyed with natural plant dyes in the past few years.  I have used up most of that on projects, with the exception of some really nice indigo yarn that I am saving for….something.  I also have been dyeing a lot of green lately.  More about that in the next blog post.  Now that I have fixed the transition problem I am back to blogging here regularly.


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