June 25, 2003
I Hit the Big Time!
Still in a bit of "who me?" shock, yesterday I went and did the natural dyeing presentation at the local high school.
I spent ten years working as a technical trainer for a large law firm. Who knew that facing eight kindergarten teachers could be as nerve-wracking as facing a roomful of rabid litigators? But my nerve-wrackedness was sorely misplaced. The whole thing went swimmingly and I had a wonderful time (or, to use a word I recently found in the Merriam Webster thesaurus, a galluptious time). It didn't hurt that I went armed with every piece of show-and-tell I could scrounge up: skeins of dyed yarn, skeins of natural yarn, alum, cream of tartar, photos, posters, a list of the criteria we used to select dye plants, a list of the flowers we planted, pictures of the flowers we planted, samples of leaves pressed between wax, a little baggie of alder cones, a mason jar of alder cone dye, books, instructional hand-outs, samples of Kool-Aid dyed yarn, and information on Kool-Aid dyeing for good measure. Unpacking my car, I felt as if I was unpacking Mary Poppins' carpetbag!
A big thanks to K for helping me get the photos and poster printed and mounted!
Knitting Knews
Once again, I'm avoiding the Oat Couture sweater. Really not in the mood to fix it. Next week K and I are going to visit the "parents-in-law." Perhaps I'll take it with me. How much do you wanna bet I also take some other project with me "just in case," and spend the weekend working on only that project? I think I need FiberRavenSoiree's Fantum Finisher to come sliding down my chimney. Don't have a chimney, but you get my point.
The Oat Couture sweater aside, I'm in the unique position of having nothing to knit right now. Nothing in the UFO pile either. Neener, neener. The Lorna's Laces socks are done except for kitchenering one toe. (We are talking five minutes of my time, one commercial break, to zip up Mr. Toe, and yet I balk! Oy.)
Casting about for something to do, I pulled out of my stash my yummy Opal Brazil yarn. The color I have is the brightly colored one at the left of this picture. (FYI for non-knitters: This yarn makes its own stripes. The socks in the picture are knit from one strand of yarn but as you knit along, the yarn changes color, automatically making a relatively complex, colorful, striped pattern.) That should be good for a few hours of mindless knitting, while I silently mouth curses at the Oat Couture sweater.
Dyer's Dyegest -- Bracken Dye!
Still on my impatient quest for Dyestuff I Can Dye with Right Now Damn It, I scoured my reference books yet uh-gain and decided to experiment with bracken. Bracken is a fern-like plant that grows in tall, single stalks. As I understand it, it is A Bad Thing if you have it in your yard -- and I have a lot of it in my yard.
I cut up the bracken (which was a very slow process since, due to my nature, I had to save every frickin' microscopic spider I found on it), soaked it in water overnight and then, unlike with the alder cones, simmered it in water to see if I could extract more color. After about half-an-hour, the water had developed only a very slight, clear, greenish tinge. Not having much faith in a pan of faintly green water and not wanting to waste much yarn, I threw in a three-inch piece of the Henry’s Attic and was startled and tickled to see it turn a beautiful shade of minty green. By that time, quite a bit of the dyebath had evaporated (an ongoing problem in the dyeing process, I’ve discovered) and there wasn’t enough dyebath remaining to dye even a puny 1/2-ounce skein of yarn. So, being a total neophyte at this, and being eager to make more green yarn, and not knowing what else to do, I threw in some fresh bracken and more water, simmered it for another half-an-hour, threw in the skein of yarn, and simmered the whole shebang for yet another half-hour. Pooh. All I got was beige yarn.
Funny thing about beige. Until I started experimenting with dyeing, I didn't think beige was a real color, at the very least, not a color that someone would go out of their way to create. I figured, if you want beige yarn, sheer a beige sheep! Wrong-o! Beige is a real color and, in fact, I have fallen quite in love with the subtle, natural color of this dyed yarn. However, it's still not the kicky green I had glimpsed earlier. Now the question is, what went wrong, and do I have the patience to try to reproduce the conditions that created the mint green yarn, or do I move on to something else? I'm pretty sure my impatience and the fresh, as in not-soaked-overnight-so-its-cellulose-can-break-down, bracken are the culprits.
A swatch knit in Bracken Beige:
The alder cone swatch for comparison:
The undyed yarn for further comparison:
On Friday, dyeing with foxglove!