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Ramble Comes to Visit!

Well, we have had a swell time with Ramble! He is quite the helper I can tell you - we did not get out much, but he did add a certain flair to Thanksgiving!
On his first day here, Ramble came along with me as my friend Amy's show-and-tell at the Jenkintown Nursery School. Amy is an art teacher, and the teachers had read the story "Charlie Needs a Cloak" to the 4-year old class, so Amy brought in me, my spinning wheel and some wool. Of course Ramble came along too! Unfortunately I cannot post any pictures from the pre-school, but here is Ramble all ready to go:

Later that evening, since he had been to school and all, he helped my son with his homework. See them here working on a project for the "Future Cities" team. Amazingly, Ramble is a very good speller.

Thanksgiving dinner was at my house this year, Ramble helped with the cooking, added to the decor, bonded with the turkeys and was generally sociable, contributing many interesting opinions to the dinner conversiation.

After dinner, he and my older son enjoyed some cats, a fire and a good book.

The holiday ended and I had some work to do - Ramble helped weight packages for shipping, and of course we had to weigh Ramble tipping the scales at 11.6 ounces.

He is ready to roll, and will head off to his next stop tomorrow. Watch for his new holiday bling!!
Cheers!
Lisa (lasdcm)

Dying Samples

Dye Color Samples:

I have been wanting to do this for a long time-I use Sabraset dyes for wool, silk and nylon etc. and have never made a color chart. When I was in art school, one of the assignments was a dye notebook. We took the colors of Procion dyes for cotton and divided them up, then dyed samples for each dye, and each dye in combination: 25% red/75% blue, 50% red/ 50% blue, 75% red/25% blue for example - then we split combinations amongst ourselves and we each ended up with a really great resource for color recipes. I treated myself to Barbara Parry's book "Hand-Dyeing" (which I really like by the way) and she has a really great way to dye alot of samples really quickly using canning jars. I had a lot of difficulty with splotches and would not ever use this method for anything but samples, but you can't beat it for quick and dirty! I have absolutely added it to my list of favorite dye techniques!

In the sabraset dyes I usually use these primaries: 2 yellows - sun yellow and mustard yellow; 3blues - navy, royal blue and turquoise; and 3 reds - deep red, scarlet and magenta. So I set myself a project of making color wheels for various red/blue/yellow combinations. I got through 3 sets this weekend which gives me SO much information!

First, I wound out a million tiny hanks of yarn! I had a skein of undyed lace-weight yarn from Knit Picks so I used that and would out little 10 yard skeins. I had some silk fabric as well, so I cut some swatches of silk to pop into each dye-bath as well. Each hanks and silk set weighed 3 grams. I mixed up 1% stock solutions for each of the 8 primaries, and figured out what combinations I would make up, knowing I had 3 ml of dye per jar to dye each sample at about 1% depth made it easy to choose- 100%. then a 50/50 and 33/66 combinations. So the dye went int each of 13 canning jars, then 87 ml of water to bring the total to 90 ml of liquid then I popped in the wool and silk samples (which had been soaking for about an hour in a pre-soak solution of 1 gallon of water with 6 Tbsp of citric acid and 2 tsp synthropal). I cleverly labled each lid with what was to go inside the jar! Always thinking! Gave everything a good stir as they went into the jars:

Each set of primaries took 13 jars since I did one jar of 1ml red, 1 ml blue and 1 ml yellow for a brown. I stirred them again before putting the lids on the jars and giving them another shake before carrying them into the kitchen and putting them in the pot. This set-up is not the greatest but it worked: 3" of water in the bottom, then the wire canning jar holder then a pizza pan perched on the wire to hold the jars:


Stuck some foil over top to get a decent seal and steamed the jars for half an hour - totally followed Barbara Perry's directions from in the book:



Turned off the heat, carefully removed the jars and let them cool (you can hear the lids all popping shut as they cool! Just like jam!) Gave everything a rinse and dried them:

Here is what I got!

I want to do some other color combinations using the violet and brown......... so easy to get carried away!

Some yummy Cormo

This came out alot greener than I thought it would, but I really like it:





Here are the singles-


And a badly exposed close-up!

Dyed More Stuff!

Did some Crock-pot dying, got my system figured out!


Roving, these are both Cormo from Shepherd Susie (whose Fiber Farm is moving to Virginia and will be henceforth be known as Juniper Moon!)

And used the extra dye up on two hanks of laceweight from Knit Picks:

Last of the Fancy Yarns on Etsy

I am posting these last two skeins of yarn on Etsy tonight - LunaKnits - I am working on closing down that shop so I lowered most of the prices on the knit scarves and shawls. Anyway, these are the last, begged, borrowed, unraveled and stole to piece together enough bits:

OK, so Fine it took THREE days.....

Lookie what I made!

Here is the more greenish ply getting steamed in the dyepot - it is roving from Martha's Vinyard Fiber Farm - my very most favorite fiber farm in all the land!

It is the top (upper) roving drying here-


All spun and plied with this blue wool which I think is correidale wool, but it seemed a little too fuzzy for correidale...ummmmm
All done! About 8 ounces, maybe about 450 yards!