July 07, 2003
Oh, Deer!
Back from a weekend at the "in-laws'." A very Norman Rockwellian place, that: A small riverside farm with two horses, a tiny barn complete with dusty antique carriage, a twee vegetable garden, lush flower beds, apricot trees, peach trees, goldfinches, hummingbirds, quail, salmon frolicking in the river, and a mule deer who nonchalantly walked through our Fourth of July picnic (before saying the deer equivalent of "yoiks!" and flinging itself into the river).
Visiting the in-laws is always a nice down-home respite, although I quickly tire of being the WLA (Weird Lesbian Aunt) and getting the hairy eyeball from the children. After all, I'm not hasn't-come-down-from-the-attic-in-twenty-years weird, I know I'm not their aunt, and I'm certainly not a le...oh. Nevermind.
This visit, I did have an ulterior motive for visiting Rockwell-Land. The beautiful roses, lilies, and dahlias share the yard with two gi-normous black walnut trees, which the natural dyeing books say have good dyeing potential. Before we left today, I "went shopping." Below, my loot:
Before I use the nuts, apparently I'm supposed to put them in a paper bag and beat the crap out of them with a hammer. Where is Freud when you need him?
On a completely different subject, the "Oat Couture" baby was born last week, after, I believe, 48 hours of labor. Now we're trying to figure out whether it took the mother longer to have the baby or me to knit the sweater (which is fixed and finished). Below a black-and-white picture of the sweater because the blue just keeps coming across washed out:
Knitting Knews
Any minute now, I expect the Knitting Police, in their lace-knit riot gear, to come pounding on my door since I did very little knitting at the in-laws'. I believe, however, that I do get extra credit in The Big Knitting Book In The Sky for knitting for two hours in the dark the night before the trip (thanks to a stiflingly hot night, a need to keep the doors open, a need to keep the lights off in order not to attract bugs, and, as always, a need to knit).
Despite a slow down in the knitting frenzy, I have made good progress on the Opal Brazil sock. How much fun are these colors?
Also, below, a picture of the finished Lorna's Laces socks for K:
Dyeing Dyegest - Dandelion Delight
For my next attempt at dyeing with plentiful, ready-to-use, already grown, already blooming, immediately available plants, I used dandelions. The reference books say you can use the flowers alone; the flowers, stems and leaves together; or roots. Again, my impatience dictated what I was going to use. I wanted to start the dandelions soaking ASAP and I wanted at least three cups of plant material so I decided to use both flowers and leaves because I could gather the amount I needed pronto, instead of picking flowerhead after flowerhead after flowerhead or digging through hard dirt for roots. I was thrilled to have K and her neighbor join me in wandering through the neighborhood picking the dandelions. It felt like one of those “since the dawn of time” female-bonding moments, to me, anyway. I started picking the dandelions by myself but then the neighbor got drawn into it and soon K did, too. Under normal circumstances, they could care less about dyeing or gathering dyestuffs, but somehow we just all ended up side by side picking the bright yellow flowers. It was very cool. If you start dyeing, I wish you a moment like this…
A picture of the dandelions soaking.
I soaked the dandelions in the water for a couple of days, and then simmered them. Imagine my frustration at seeing the dandelions make yet another brown dyebath! I put the yarn in and, sure enough, it turned a disappointing brown. One of the books said that sometimes adding ammonia would help so I threw a glug of it in. Nothing happened. Argh! Still, determined to see the process through to the end, after the yarn had simmered for the prescribed amount of time, I took it out and rinsed it. I was astonished to see the brown color fall away, leaving a lovely golden yellow! The yarn still has a “natural” look about it which is hard to describe – maybe it’s the ever-so-slight acidy overtone – but there’s no denying it’s yellow. Such fun! Now I have a mini-stash of honey-colored, beige-colored, chiffon-colored and yellow-colored yarn. Now for that elusive bracken mint green!
FYI, I was hoping to post a picture of the foxglove yarn but the photo came out looking beige, not the delicate chiffon yellow the yarn really is, so no photo.
Posted by Ryan at July 7, 2003 09:53 AM