Indigo Dyed Wool Hand Spun By Me

Now I won't tell you this dye came from my garden as my madder dye plants were. But I did try. I planted 18 indigo plants. And one did sprout up and grew to be a pretty big plant. But the process of creating a dye from the plant was, um, baffling. Strangely, by accident, dripping some of the pre-reduced liquid on my yarn put a pale blue splotch on one of the skeins. That was strange. I did not see this until I was ready to place the yarn into the indigo vat. Well, it was a mini vat. And smelled pretty foul. But all that busy work and no color. Boo. Here is where I bought the Indigo seeds

So I was like, what the heck, let me go with some pre-reduced indigo. At left is what it looks like. Very awesome. Here is the link to where I bought it.
 Brush Creek Wool Works
I bought 2 bags of 1 oz each at 4.50 a bag. I used 1/2 a bag and got all the color you see in the yarn above. So much easier. I liked there was no weeding the around the plant. Sorry no pictures. That computer's guts vanished. It was a Vista. You can see why it died. But I love old things. I cannot help it. Hell, I still have my Windows Millennium upstairs in the back room which is actually an attic-ish type spooky place. There also hides two old typewriters. And you may have seen my Walking Wheel elsewhere on this blog. Enough said.

These two skeins on the right I tried to get a heathered feel by tying the skeins with two knots. Though the colors are lighter here than in real life, I hope you can see how they turned out. I love heathered yarns. 

Oh man, there is a teen aged human wondering around. Not a bad thing mind you just that he is awake. Time to get gone. 

Madder Root as a Dye

Someone posted a message on my blog and Blogger sent me an email about it.

Well guess I should do some visiting and start some typing. 

 Life has been very busy. Intense.

 

 Above is a picture of the madder root. Which the plants grew for 4 years in the garden.

 

 This picture shows off the deep orange reddish color. I like it. I just threw a bunch of roots into the pot keeping in mind I would need space for about 4 oz of fiber. Poured water to cover the roots, set the pot outside in the sun and left it sit overnight. Next day in another pot I did 1 3/4 teaspoon alum for the mordant along with 1 1/2 teaspoon cream of tarter with my wool and simmered about 45 minutes. Moved wool to dye pot and put on low heat. Brought to real low simmer and cooked all day. Also before adding the fiber I added about 1/4 cup of calcium carbonate. Also know as ice melt. Yes, really. You can also add ammonia when the dye pot is cool but please look this up. It can harm wool. BUT it clears the orange and brings out the red. Just saying.

This market bag held the roots to keep them separate from the fiber and got dyed a good color. Happy accident. Below are some skeins which dyed up very differently. You can see some of the colors are very soft.

In the picture below this color was the first root soak which I though was nice enough to dye with. Most instructions say to pour that first soak off. Naa. I most definitely used it for a dye and ....

 ....knit up this pretty shawl with the yarn.

The bottom picture is a close up.

Which by the way this pattern was a tough little beast. It was a YouTube knit along with a lady from Russia. I loved her accent. My problem was the chart for the border and its repeat. I had to make up some stitches. I don't love charts but I wanted this shawl!
 The Gail Shawl part 1 

The Gail Shawl part 2

Note 1: I guess if anyone does give Gail a chance I would suggest to use markers to separate the repeats on both charts.
Note 2: I located the charts through the Wayback Machine
I think I put in her name, Dina Nugusheva.

I hope this was interesting enough and useful for the natural dyer enthusiast!
Happy fiber adventures!  

A Spindle Wheel On YouTube: Link below

Kinda cute. Kinda clunky. An option for someone...

And now. May I introduce the new addition to my fiber family.

                                                                      
                                          Ain't he a beaut.
This is a Brother Drum Carder . Has the lowest price far as I can see. It works good. Not used it for a bit cause I've been spinning from the (tangled) locks.

                                          Wanna see something amazing?

                                                  
Now that is gorgeous. My genuis husband made it. A true MacGyver it. But sadly the nails were too close up and down and all around. He took it away. I did say it didn't work. I think I may have hurt their feelings. I do hope he tries to make another lovely some day.

                                         Look at those teeth!
You can see where I removed some of the nails hoping it would help. But alas...

To the person searching for free box picker instructions, here's a Link for a picker already made. I have one but I seem to have forgotten to take a picture of it. Not to expensive. Something like 140 -150 bucks. (For those not in the US it's the shipping that kills ya. But a girl's gotta have what a girl's gotta have, right?). I have not found free instrux for a wool picker anywhere online. Yet. (Mumbles to self, "hmmm, maybe the husband will scratch one up....")

Well, looks like my camera cord has up and walked away. Hiding out. Really? No. I put it somewhere safe. Yeah. Must'a thought it was a good spot. Anyway, I wanted to share some pictures of the lastest batch of yarn I'm been working on. Some was dyed with marigolds and some with sunflowers. Again I will say this is so fun. I guess I'll have to force my lazy butt back online another day and post some pics. I'd rather do a bit of spinning, but then again I do want to share about my (how slow can ya go) progress.

Time for bed...

For the First Time, Introducing... My Hand Spun

It is a bit on the rustic side. But I don't mind. I'm learning so it's okay. Which, by the way, what I'm trying to learn is the long draw. It's starting to come together. Which, by the way, means the yarn I'm trying to learn to spin is not falling apart as I spin. This is probably why my yarn is a bit on the rustic side. Not trying to make excuses. But, well, it's kinda hard. I love doing it. What's wrong with me? Not really sure. Kinda hard to explain.

                   Ignore the date found at lower right hand corner.

This is a wonderful pattern created by Yolanda Teague. You can find it on Ravelry and is called the Cloud Bolero. I was lucky. Got the pattern back in 2010 when it was still free at Yarn Forward Mag.

Okay, wrong. Cloud Bolero is no longer available but a new version is. There is a link from the Cloud page to the new pattern. She also has some notes on the differences between them at her blog. That link also on Cloud page. Yolanda Teague on Ravelry

And so the above was made with one of my hand spun yarns. It was dyed with orange osage wood chips in an iron pot over an outside fire. Another story for another day. I did not care for the color so I over dyed with tobacco. The roll your own type. For real.

                     Here is the tobacco simmering. Horrible smelling stuff.

                                                 And here is the dye.

      This is how it came out. Added a bit of rustiness to the color which I liked better.

And here is a sweet little something for a sweet little person. This was spun up from wool shorn from a local Jacob sheep. The cocoon was so very soft. Baby's need soft. The mommy was very pleased.

And so this is what my PVC/bike spinning wheel has helped me to create. There was more but has been knitted or crocheted into something and given away.

A quick note on the two pattern links I put up on how to make a PVC spinning wheel. It seems one of the links is dead. That would be the free pattern. I will say the other pattern is worth every penny of the $7.00 price. And it will help out a fellow crafty person. Hey, run don't walk and get you one.

                 There were some needed changes. Will post on that soon.

Have a good day.

Adventures In Dyeing

 

Poke berries are poison. Do not eat. Do make a red (or purple or whatever color happens) dye. I got this idea from the book "A Weaver's Garden" by Rita Buchanan. She says berries need to ferment to give up their colors. The dye bath:

 

 

I'm annoyed with Blogger. It's all changed and I don't like to relearn. Anyway, the color is lovely, am I right? The scarf dyed with poke berries:

The fiber at the right was also dyed with poke berries but I added some pennys just to see what would happen. Kinda orangey.

So, the skein shown above is the original color of the scarf. You can see the line on the scarf where the color changes from the skeins dyeing a bit differently. Shame on me.

That yarn was on sale at 2 dollars a skein. It's Michael's Loops and Threads "Horizon Tweed
Thick and Thin Bulky Roving". I have more poke berries fermenting but don't have any more yarn!

Here we have walnuts after a 3 day soak and a 2 hour boil. I thought about cracking one open to see if they may be edible. Couldn't do it.

Here we have two pots of yarn and wool taking up the dye. With walnut splatters all about. I premordanted with alum. Each pound of fiber got 4 ounces of the mordant and was boiled for 1 hour.

And here in the dish pan we have the completed dye project. The color is so pretty. I enjoyed doing this!

This yarn was Lion Brand's Fisherman's Wool. The pink yarn on the left is also Fisherman's Wool but that was dyed with Wilton's Burgundy as well as some walnut dye. This idea came from Dye Your Yarn. She has formulas with all types of food dyes for sooo many kinds of color. Fun.

For the pink yarn I made a very long skein wrapping the Fisherman Wool around our swing outside. A pic:

The yarn was draped into 3 dye pots, 2 walnut and the pink was in the middle. I seemed to have forgotten to take a picture, silly me. It was left to simmer 1 hour and was not mordanted. Though a bit vinegar was used for the food coloring. Another picture of the Wilton Burgundy dyed Fisherman's Wool:

 

 

 

 

Well, I hope you enjoyed viewing my little dyeing adventure! Thanks for stopping by.

I'm Feeling Brain Dead

The problem... was... no computer... near the end of last year. But that has been resolved (my son's baby's mom gave me one as a gift). And so much has been happening and so much new things have been learned (sweet delish fiber goodness) that I do not know where to start. And with no computer lying around I did not use a camera just got lazy and well the brain is overloaded with it all.

Spinning. Yes, on my pvc pipe and bike wheel spindle as pictured elsewhere on this blog. I guess I am an over spinner.  But I'm learning...

Dyeing:  Very interested in natural dyes. Funny thing is they are hard to understand and woe. So far I've tried poke berries, blueberries (those both very light coloration), and of course good ol' onion skins (very deep color). Lets see, what else? Oh yeah, red cabbage. That was a beauty. Light purple; lilac. It was a color to dye for. Problem was it did not take. Lovely color in the pot, not a drop on the yarn. Dern it. Have heard a lot about mordants. They are sooo very important:
    "Simmer/boil with wool for an hour, cool then wash/rinse...OR
    "Simmer/boil with wool for an hour, let cool in pot overnight, then wash/rinse...OR
    "Simmer/boil with wool for an hour, let it sit overnight, stuff into a plastic bag and set aside for 3 or 4 days...
After performing one of the possibilities listed above you then move on to the dye pot. I'm, like, thinking natural dyes are fickle. I haven't tried the extended rest version yet. That will be next. Because really, I love those natural colors. Can't give up.

Buying: A bit of fiber, a bit of yarn, a fiber tool here a fiber tool there a fiber tool wistfully everywhere. I try mostly to buy localy. Me and my sister found a nice place near her. "Apple Tree Acres Alpacas" run by Ed and Karen Rogers in Utica, Illinios. They welcome visitors but plesae call first! Sis bought some alpaca fiber for my (2010 June) birthday. A beautiful gift. But it's a real terror to spin for a beginner. Like me. Of course you need real fiber combs. Time to move up from the doggie brush. Will break the bank (75 bucks!), but what can ya do? Take the plunge my friend. Take the plunge. Yes, a few other small treasures: a top and a bottom whorl spindle. I try to feel no shame.

Knitting: Ah yes, knitting. Lots of such. Especially with the stuff I've spun. It's all one ply. Some of the kinks don't come out after the finishing stage. Chuff, chuff.

Crochet: My default when I can not stand any of the above one moment longer. Kinked up tangles. Fibers not binding. Not dyeing. Rip it. Shread it. Hair pulling hissy fit.

Sure. Some folks think anyone acting like that is messed up.

Naa. Really, in the world of fiber, it's normal.

A note to those of you who stop by to check out the "Aran Sweater" and "Pvc Spinning Wheel" post, a quick thank you! This encurages me to get back to posting updates on things of interest. And there a some who come by to look for free knit and crochet patterns. I will shortly get to posting on some stuff that I've been up to. Nothing special. It's all fun.