Saturday, November 12, 2011

date night...

i've been gently (well, maybe not so gently) begging asking amythefibergoddess to guide me down the path of fiber dyeing. it just never seems to work out that we can hook up. so when i finished the miami beach shawl for her, she wanted to compensate me and all i wanted was a lesson in her dyeing kitchen. so last night, her herd was away and i was free so we had a date night!
i showed up at her door with two fleeces that i grabbed from the garage. now, here i will interject that i have a great partner, and while i was away at a fibery event all the summer furniture was stored for the winter. in the storage process all my washed, labeled fleeces were moved. so sadly i have no clue what fleece i grabbed, but it was a beauty. white, lustrous, long staple length.
the process was exact and more time consuming than difficult. the hardest part was choosing a color. or did i want several colors. would they blend together? clash? i had absolutely no idea. amy was a saint. i finally just said, 'you know me, pick!' she guided me to ~cape cod red (really, i sort of did that on my own) and mocha chino and golden pear. the idea is to have these carded together into roving.
so off we went, soaking the wool, heating pots, mixing dye solutions. i loved it!

as we were finishing the first batch, amy looks over at the grey fleece that i brought and exclaims 'lets do that too!' really? i'm there. so we went back to the color charts and debated what to over-dye this beautiful grey with. teal? not me. blue? i've done lots of blue recently. green? you can see how this was not going well. we finally came around to plum. it rocked! in fact amy was so happy she is considering it for one of her projects. we wrapped it up and i came home with several pillow-cases of colorful, wet wool.

and here it is! the november weather cooperated with a breeze, sunny day. left to right: plum, mocha chino, golden pear and cape cod cranberry.
next week i'll be sending it off to the mill. i couldn't be happier!

1 comment:

Diane said...

Can't wait...I just love seeing how customer's color choices come trundling out the carder!