Category: Dye

We were over at my Mom’s over the weekend. Martin helped her prune her apple tree, and this is what I got out of the deal:

Two batches of natural dye material! The left is what I got after simmering the crumbled leaves (it’s been HOT! and dry around here, and the leaves dried to a crisp in less than 24 hours) and twigs for a couple of hours. The right is a bucket of cool water with peeled bark from limbs. I left most of the pruning behind, because I just wanted a little batch.

All the instructions I had on extracting dye from apple leaves and bark say to leave it soaking for several days/weeks. Simmering at the end is optional. Well, I couldn’t wait, so I simmered the leaves/twigs batch. I’ll let the bark soak for as long as I can stand it. The same instructions also state that mordants are not necessary for protein fibers. Does anyone have experience with apple dye extract out there?

Here’s a vest that I’ve been wrestling with.

I mentioned earlier that I didn’t like the way the shoulders turned out, so I took paper and pencil and calculated what I really wanted in the armhole and neck shaping, triple and quadruple checked my math, and did it all again. I think it turned out pretty well. Unfortunately, I’m not thrilled with my cast on (not stretchy enough). So, I may take a pair of scissors and snip off the ribbing at the waist and do something different.

So much work for for such a simple vest. But I’m loving the result thus far! Unfortunately, I could only leave it on for less than 30 seconds when I tried it on last night. It’s been hitting the 100 mark for the past several days, and we have another day of it before the heat breaks.

Shameless plug: Tomorrow is the first meeting of the year for Black Sheep Handweavers’ Guild. This year the meetings will be held at Woodside Village Church. It’s on the second Thursday of the month, starting at 7:30 PM. Our speaker this month is Ana Lisa Hedstrom.

Best laid plans and all that. It’s been a week and I still can’t decide if I should laugh or cry when I retell the story … I might as well tell it here since so many people have heard, winced, and laughed over this story — before it becomes an urban legend.

As I mentioned before, I was supposed to fly down to California for a job interview. One day down and back. Easy. Easier than a lot of business trips that I’ve taken in the past. No big deal.

During the in-flight beverage service, I ordered my usual hot tea. Well, if any of you have had tea on an airplane before, you know that the adjective “hot” is subjective. Most of the time, it’s generous to call it “tepid.” Unfortunately, this was the outlyer … it was hot, HOT, HOT! During one of those smooth moves you make on a plane, trying to get yourself comfortable, or as comfortable as you can in the middle seat of a standing room only airplane, opening The Wall Street Journal to the page that talked about your current company’s quarterly earnings call when the fellow in front of you has his seat back — all the way back. You guess it. That there cup of tea landed in my lap.

I think the entire plane heard me yell. Then there’s the fumbling trying to find my seat belt and get everyone around me to stand up. Before I know it, I was up in the 1st class closet that they call a bathroom, watching my leg blister up in 2nd degree burns.

I won’t bore you with the details, but here are some of the highlights …

• When we landed in San Jose, I was greeted by 1 female flight ops personnel, 1 female Emergency Medical Tech, 1 male EMT, 2 male fire fighters … the police officers stayed on the ground.
• The bubbly 1st class flight attendant asked me if I didn’t feel lucky to have all these gorgeous young men waiting for me …
• Then they asked me to take my pants off so they can decide what to do next, or would I prefer that they cut it off of me?
• Then I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in the Emergency Room, waiting for someone to take a look at my leg.

Needless to say, I never got to my interview. Once they got codeine down me at the ER (I turned the morphine down because I somehow still thought that I could salvage the interview), I asked for a taxi to take me back to the airport so I can catch the next flight home.

So, what’s the pithy moral of the story? Mother knows best … always wear clean, fresh underwear. And throw the old stuff out. You never know what’s going to happen and who’s going to see those holey underwear. The entire first class cabin, for example, when the flight attendant keeps opening the door to the ‘loo to see if you need anything else. (Yes, I had on fairly new underwear so I wasn’t too embarrassed … actually, the embarrassment faded rather quickly when the pain set in.)

As a friend told me, I beat all the best interview horror stories hands down — or is it “pants down?” You tell me.

On to fibery talk …

In any case, I didn’t get to spend any time knitting the Pi Shawl. It’s been sitting neglected for the past week.

Instead, I’ve knitted these instead … dressing covers that are a bit more comfortable than ace bandages over the dressing. I wear these now at night to keep the dressing from falling off while I twist and turn to find a comfortable position.

Norman Kennedy Natural Dye Workshop

Despite how much it hurt, I still went to the Norman Kennedy workshop on Saturday and Sunday … along with my pain pills and lots of bandages in case I needed to re-dress. Are you kidding? Of course I went. I figured I can take a pain pill and sit/lay down if I had to, but I was not going to miss meeting the legend.

Eye candy … the dye samples:

Yellows: left to right
– fustic on wool
– cutch on wool
– cutch on cotton

Blues: left to right
– fustic overdyed with indigo (resulted in a heathered forest green)
– indigo on wool
– indigo on cotton (short/single dip — don’t know, Eva did these for me while I rested my leg)
– indigo on cotton (longer/multiple dips)

Reds: left to right
– cochineal with oxalic acid and tin, some fustic as brightener, on wool
– same, second bath with more fustic, on wool
– cochineal with alum and cream of tartar, on wool
– cochineal with alum and cream of tartar, on wool/silk blend
– cochineal with alum and cream of tartar, on silk
– cochineal with alum and cream of tartar, on mohair

In addition to dyeing, Norman gave us demos on the long draw, the supported spindle, carding, and the walking wheel — not to mention a ballad or two. What fun. It was definitely worth the pain.

Yesterday afternoon, I started to spin a bit with my wheel. The excuse is that Martin wanted me to start stretching the healing skin a bit as it heals to make sure that it doesn’t lose its suppleness. I thought that treadling moves the skin without stressing it and would be a good idea. Would you believe that he agreed with me?

By the way, just in case you are curious. He’s been taking great care of me. Thank goodness for all those years of skin regeneration research he did for a living, huh? How lucky can a girl get?

Okay, I don’t want to hear it, I know … if I had been really lucky, that cup of tea would have been tepid.

Oh, and the company that I was to interview at? They’ve been great. They called me at the ER to make sure that I was okay. Cancelled my appointments for the day. Offered me a hotel room for the night if I didn’t feel like traveling home that day. And will be rescheduling my interviews once I feel up to traveling again.

Here are the pictures from my last week’s kool-aid dying experiment. It is a haphazard dyeing process. Whatever felt right, and sometimes, even when it didn’t feel right I just kept going with it. These are not my first kool-aid experiments, but just the ones I played with over the holiday weeks.

Kool-Aid Experiment #1

This was an 8 oz skein of Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool dyed in the skein on the stove top. I soaked the skein in hot water for about an hour. Then squeezed it out some, and submerged one end of the skein in a crockpot with 2 packets of very berry, simmered for about 30 minutes (didn’t really keep track). I rinsed it briefly, and submerged the other end in with 2 packets of grape (this was the grape flavored one that starts out orange and changes to red … I was just curious what it would turn out like).

Once I took the skein out and rinsed, I realized that the inside of the skein didn’t have much color to it. (Next day) So I took another 2 packets of very berry and poured them into holes that I excavated into the skein. Microwaved on high for about 3 minutes, waited a couple, and then microwaved again for another 3 minutes. Rinsed, and voila!

I like the results. Although I don’t think I will skein dye with a skein this large and tightly packed again. I’ll restricted my expriments to smaller amounts of yarn. The yarn on the outside is totally saturated and the yarn on the inside has more white to it where the dye didn’t get to. I’ll make house socks with these. (Toe-up socks on the needles there.)

Kool-Aid Experiment #2

I pulled out 8 oz of mystery white roving that I had around and decided to do some dying using Twisted Sisters spot dye method, except with kool-aid. I don’t have pictures of the dyeing process because I was trying to do it while Martin was out of the house. He doesn’t like to overwhelming smell of cooked kool-aid. Come to think of it, I don’t either, but I’m immune from the year that I spent in Marine World making cotton candy for the masses, way back when. Anyway, I had limited time so I was trying to get it all done and cleaned up before he got home.

Colors:
1. 3 packets of grape in 10 oz of hot water
2. 2 packets of orange/red grape flavor (see experiment #1) in 6 oz of hot water
3. 1 packet of orange in 6 oz of hot water

The orange and orange colored grape were too close to each other, so I put a couple of teaspoons of the regular grape solution to darken it. It became a beautiful blood-orange color.

I used teaspoonse to dribble dye on the fiber. The first set of rovings, I squeezed too much water out. The colors just sat where I put them and didn’t do much soaking in. Subsequent ones where squeezed much more gently to retain more of the hot water. However, the ended up blending more than I wanted. Sigh, where’s the baby bear’s bed when you want it?

After coloring the roving, I wrapped the plastic wrap up, jelly-roll style, put it in a corning pot and microwaved 3 minutes on high, rest, and another 3 minutes on high. Set it in the side sink to cool, while the next batch went in. I think I was able to get the second jelly roll in after the first 3 minutes, so I always had 2 jelly rolls going, one on its first steam, and the other on its final steam. I continued to rotate them through until I finished all the rovings.

After rinsing and washing them, I put them in lingerie bags and the final fast spin in my front loading washer, then hung them up to dry.

I was lazy when preparing the fiber. They were bunched up in round ropes. I didn’t take the time to pull them out flat. So instead of dots in places, I had stripes of color across the width of the roving. I was a little disappointed when I saw them hanging on the drying rack. But once I pulled apart the rovings. Wow. What a transformation! It still wasn’t what I was hoping to get, but it is pretty in it’s own way. Not my colors, but still very nice.

I’m calling it sea shells. It has all the colors of the shells you pick up off the beach during those lazy summers at the beach house. Creamy white, light ochre, light corals, and mauve. Picture on the right shows some of the pre-drafted rovings, singles, and one of the finished 2-ply skeins.

Moral of the story? Don’t give up, no matter what you think of your dye experiment. Do play with it a little. It might surprise you. And if you don’t like the results, try over-dyeing it with something else, or just more of the same color to get to the color saturation you want. If there’s really no hope for it, them either card it with something else or make felt toys with them. My kitties will take them.

Finished Object

I made a pair of fingerless gloves for Martin, using this Knitty pattern by Bonne Marie. I modified it a little. Instead of worsted weight, I used Lorna’s Laces sportsweight in Douglas Fir nearly solid. I casted on 56 stitches on size 3 needles. The 2×2 rib makes it so that it fits both of us without binding his hand! The yarn is so soft it feels like you’ve got your hands in a nice warm cloud. Yum. I think I’ll be making another one for myself soon.