Saturday, April 28, 2007

Babysitting, Part II


We took a walk this morning after breakfast while we waited for Mommy. Allie is rearranging rocks. She decided to make them more pretty.









This is the beautiful rock that she wanted me to have.




Papa joined us at the end of the walk. He had plenty of company -including our neighbor's enthusiastic black lab, Sammi.



After Mommy collected the kidlets, Mim and I mordanted skeins for the guild dye day in two weeks. I know so little about this process but we followed the instructions from "North American Dye Plants" by Anne Bliss. We used alum, along with cream of tartar - the other mordants are just too scary.

4 comments:

Birdsong said...

I agree with you about the mordants; it's too bad that the best results come from the heavy metal mordants. You might consider 'saddening' some with cast iron. I am glad the little guests had a good time.

Leigh said...

Ooo, good for Allie. Sounds like you have a budding artist on your hands. :)

About spinning the Bowmont, it has been washed but has just a little bit of grease in it (I don't spin in the grease). Just enough to make it spin up beautifully.

Thanks for mentioning the Anne Bliss book. I'm going to take a look for this. I am very interested in your natural dye experiments!

Valerie said...

You can also mordant w/ copper. It used to be you could just put pennies in the mordant bath, but the composition of pennies has changed. Why not try mordanting w/ a piece of copper plumbing pipe in the mordant bath? And Birdsong already mentioned iron, which 'saddens' colors.
Have fun!

woolydaisy said...

hi-sharon-i tried to email you-but it was returned. i was commenting on your comment-everyone tells us to go to hot august nights-but we have some issues- i don't like heat and i hate crowds.-my little son has a harder time with crowds than i do. so how hot is it and crowed-really? is it hard to find a room? p.s.-that allie is just too cute-can i take her home?