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!  

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.

Oh Hell No

My Vista computer is fried. How dare it. Probably the mother board. Can't fix her right now so I pulled out the old ME and hooked that dinosaur up. Many, many glitches. Yuck. Just started enjoying Ravelry. Now I seem to be in read only mode. No responding to posts, no PMing. Not really interested in finding out what else I cannot do. But we can get online and well, that is something, I guess. Contacted HP and the dear man on the other side of the line says to me, "honestly, ~3 years~ of using a computer, truthfully that is to be expected". Mother board fried after only 3 years? I held my tongue. He did offer me a one time deal of a lap top and a computer all for about 1,000 dollars. Well damn, let me check my back pocket. Husband Darling-Dear believes a year of no central air (yeah, damn thing's also fried) is what did it. Maybe so. Maybe not so. Seem's like there's lot's getting fried at my house. Time to go fishing. Do a fish fry. I guess.

Anyone else going through hell and back? Funny thing, this is nothing compared to what my house was going through the past few years. I should shut my mouth.

On a happier note. Pulled out my fiber goods and started to do a bit of spinning again. I parked my arse right in the living room so my hubby can feel sorry for me and get that wool picker constructed. Just a little ol' box picker. The discussion proceeded this way.

HDD: "Why don't you look for a used picker online. How much do they cost?"
He's talking about one of those Fancy Pickers made by Pat Green. He likes them. I look on Ravelry (pre-fried computer) and see several. $450-500.
Me: "Good price, babe?"
HDD: "Well, where's those plans."
Me: "There's one lady who sells a box picker for $150."
HDD: "Naaa." He's now looking at instrux. I'm a bad girl.

Shoot, I need to get back on Ravelry and look for the gal who makes spindles. She has real nice directions on getting a good friction fit.

Gotta love Ravelry.

Have I any wool? Yes sir...

2 bags full

This one I am currently working with. Pretty soft and very fine.

I think I'll save this for my PVC spinning wheel. Wonder how the color will come out when spun and made into yarn? The brown is real pretty but the white is a little stark in comparison. Will be interesting to see.

I wanted to show some projects that use up all those small leftover balls of yarn. Those which I annoyingly just cannot throw away.

granny square cap

3 long print yarns were used here. Easy coloration, fun to make.

head bands...

These are versions of the headband pattern posted elsewhere on my blog. The top two are the dc post stitch/s and the bottom two are in the extended sc stitch also posted elsewhere. The blue and green used peaches and creme's double WW cotton . Deft Blue and Apple Green. The others are also in their cotton.

handbands...

and more handbands...

plus one more for a little tike

This one and the dark blue above were finished with slip st at the edges instead of reverse sc on my other headbands. This was done at each front post dc st skipping the back post sts.

a close up of the post stitch