Sunday, January 01, 2006

back from the holidays

Drove down to LA on Christmas Eve for the holidays. It was a bit of a fiasco. I had planned to drive down Thursday, but needed to take care of some thing with my cat, then figured Friday morning, but by the time the car was packed it was three in the afternoon and my mother threw a fit at the thought of me driving by myself in the dark. Saturday it was then, a smooth drive down, and a surprised mother at the end as I unloaded a car-ful of fiber and my spinning wheel.

Since my wrists have been bugging me, I'm trying to keep knitting to a minimum which is tortuous. So instead, I spent my time in LA working on a series of naturally dyed blue-faced leicester roving which are being spun and knitted into a hat. Next time, I'll use distilled water, but using tap water this time I again got quite unexpected results from my plant dyes. The walnut dyed rovings are a soft grey-black. Hollyhock turned the rovings a cream to golden color depending on the mordant. (Hollyhock is supposed to produce a red dye; last time I used it, everything turned green.) Staghorn lichen yielded a bright yellow. An experimental moldy olive bath was initially disappointing in that the rich dark grey color of the dye bath washed right out of the wool. However, the muted green left behind is appealing under further inspection. Copper mordanted wool (soft pale green), natural white blue faced leicester and natural dark blue faced leicester round out the colors. Aren’t they purty?



A bit more spinning to go, and then to design the hat...

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