Dye Day

Mim has been saying for the past month that we need to do some dyeing. We finally set a date for July 30th, yesterday. The day before I got an email from our friend Linda who had sniffed color in the wind, asking if she could tag along. Who knew she was on vacation?! Actually, Allison mentioned it to her because she was going to come but ended up teaching at Jimmy Beans. It was great. They both have a wonderful eye for color. I don't think I dyed anything for the first hour - just visited, watched and enjoyed my friends. But then that darned silk bug struck and I just had to dye these. The top one is the hot-pour method from the Twisted Sisters book, but the bottom one is done with the mix color, squish on, wrap in plastic and steam. My crisis - I ran out of vinegar. I used to have two gallons of white vinegar in the garage - not no mo'. The silk is from Brown Sheep.
This is a different kind of silk - don't know what it is. I bought it at Judith Mac Kenzie's workshop in Virginia City. I also did the hot-pour method on this. I'm really liking it more as time goes on. The squish and steam method, while fun in a group, is really a lot of work. I admit that you have more control and can do short color repeats, but I'm a lazy person and that's a lot of work - I think I mentioned that already.

I dyed two ounces of my hoggit Ram-
bouillet Alpaca blend. It's so fine I haven't known what to do with it. Linda brought some show-and-tell angora yarn that she's going to knit up as lace. I think I'd like to take this over to Mim's. She has a mini-mill Patrick Green carder and this would be spectacular blended with some angora for lace, but I'm a project ahead of myself. I need to finish spinning the Tunis for the state fair before I can even think about spinning this silk. Tunis, a primitive breed, is the state fair breed for 2008. When you're a spinner, there's no such thing as boredom but I don't need to tell you that.