Thursday, August 09, 2007

Left, right and center

Tourism? Newfoundland? Later on that. For the time being we are awash in kool aid and fleece and can hardly think of anything else. And the elderberries? Eh. Not quite the deeply satisfying experience that we have been having with kool aid. It looked so very promising;

Here are the berries after being soaked overnight and boiled for 1/2 hour. They made a delighttful lavender colour that was exactly like what my manual said would happen.


See? Doesn't that look promising?

But two hours and a big felted piece of merino roving later (grrr!), I had a skein of yarn (and a giant piece of felt) that was...ummm...let us say, tan. Ho-hum. I didn't even take a picture because, really, who needs to see some tan yarn?

Ok. So scratch the elderberries off the list. For the above reason and because I ended up with ants in my pants collecting them--the tree is situated right next to an ant hill, which I stood upon to pick the berries until I was covered, inside and out, with black ants. Neither of us was terribly pleased. Like I said, scratch elderberries.

Back to the kool aid.


Here is the lovely Lucy surrounded by our new obsession.


A quick hat that was begging to be made from one of our earlier experiments. I spun four colors together in several yard intervals, each bobbin slightly different, then plyed them together.


At the suggestion of Patti, here is the latest: some perrendale fleece in three colours, blended during carding. Matches the blanket covering the couch (that's a chesterfield to you). I have the first 2-ply skein soaking now.

Back to tourism, museums and all tomorrow...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

the rosy pink is beautiful!

i am not a fan of pink, generally, but rose is whole nuther color!

easter egg dye tabs make good dyes too, (so do bottles of food coloring, if you can find the 2 oz bottles)

i like liquid dyes better than powder ones.. they are bit safer to use.

for natural dyes, nothing quite beats onion skins. (you needs pounds!) boiled up they look dingey yellow, but they yeild a lovely golden yellow (yarn) in the end!
(talk to your green grocer (does anyone but me still use that term?) the dried paper skins give the best color.

Xxx. Xxxx said...

I've seen the results of onion skin dyeing (early products-of-nature dyeing experiment--I tried moss, friend tried onion skin, I produced so-subtle-it-was-absolutely-undetectable pale green/tan ick, she produced rich golden yellow, I was deeply envious), and it's a stunning yellow. Short version: I agree with oftroy.

Beautiful rose, Robyn!