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Natural Dyeing - Onion Skin Edition

The weather is becoming rather fall-like here on the farm. The trees have moved from the mass of red, orange and yellow to brown. Today I was able to catch some bright color on the old milk house; the ivy on the south side was at its most vibrant red in the morning sun. With fall in the air it seemed appropriate to have the house smell like cooked/cooking onions all day. I had saved all the onion skins from this summer, both yellow and red amounting to about 1.75 ounces or just under 50 grams. It was an entire produce bag full. Below it is pictured with about 20 yards of white wool I had spun from my nephew´s sheep. Before I go any further a disclosure should be made about the equipment being used for dyeing. All the sources I have read about dyeing say the same thing about the vessel to use; it should be stainless steel and a pot you will not use again for cooking. Under nonpandemic times this would mean a quick trip to the thrift store, but we are living in different
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Natural Dyeing - Black Walnut Edition

In the back of my head I have had for a very long time this idea of trying my luck at dyeing with some of the most common natural dyeing materials around. In fact I had hoped to take a dyeing class at the local Minneapolis Textile Center this year and that, of course, did not happen. Short of the class I decided to dive into it by reading a few books and blog posts and then just do it. The wine stain, the final product of the story worth telling , was my first attempt using scoured, spun, plied and mordanted white wool to get color. As first attempts go it turned out pretty well. Throughout the spring and summer I have been saving two composting products from the kitchen: onion skins and avocado skins and their seeds. According to the book I have one needs the same weight in these natural dye starters as the weight of the yarn to be dyed. As you can imagine that means a whole lot of onion skins. We are getting there. Avocados are much easier to get that weight but truth be
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My Ten-Stitch Blanket

Elizabeth Zimmerman in her book, ¨ The Opinionated Knitter , gives directions on how to make a mitred-corner blanket using strips of simple garter stitch knitted fabric. She has the knitter hand sew together all the pieces. It is such a simple idea and a great way to use up small odds and ends of leftover yarn. The only problem for me is all that hand sewing which does not play to my strengths. A designer, Frankie Brown , inspired by the EZ technique revised the work using the ten stitch idea and connecting the new strip to the previous one as the project is knit. This offers all the advantages of a simple design and none of the, for me, tedious sewing. I have started such a blanket for myself a year or so ago. It uses up those bits of yarn left from 20 years of knitting, mainly scarves, shawls and mittens. As I reviewed my stash I realized there was also a fair amount of short yardage hand spun wool. Mainly it was samples I had made in the spinning classes I had taken.
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Reconstruction

Mom and I have been very careful.  Groceries are picked up after someone else has done the shopping (Instacart employee), no gatherings of any kind are attended and if family stops by we sit outside physically distancing.  So there have been no runs to the LYS although some of us might argue yarn is essential.  Nor is there a need for more yarn or roving on my part, there is in my stash more than a lifetime supply.  And of course I still have about 1.5 sheep´s worth of fleece to spin anyway.  Having said that I needed a break from the sea of white that I´ve been working on for the last several weeks.  So I picked something with bold colors to distract me for a short time. I did bring with me a lovely merino wool that I had spun very early in my spinning career.  I know it is merino by the feel of it and its shorter staple even though the label that would give details is missing.  It was the colors that attracted me to it.  The ball of yarn I made is pictured below and as you see the sp
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One Worth Telling -- Part IV-The End

This is it the last post in the current four-part series.  The fleece we are working on is washed, picked, carded and spun.   Here is a photo of how I used some of the yarn in a project I am making. The first 50 yards or so of white; not my best spinning And here is what my oldest grand-niece knit with her approximate 160 yards of yarns. She did such a great job with this hat. And although it is a lovely white I thought it might be fun to dye a few of those mini hanks being made to see what happens.  Again starting a new process took a certain amount of research to learn what items needed to be purchased to dye.  And of course a few new words needed to be learned along the way.  The first step is to mordant the yarn.  This means one adds a naturally occurring metallic salt to a bath of water and plunge the wool in it.  The water with the yarn in it is slowly brought to 190 degrees F for 30 minutes and kept there for a additional hour.  For protein fibers like wool I used potassium alum
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One Worth Tell - Part III

We will discuss the whole nep/noil thing but first a tale about selling rolags. With two full sheep´s worth of fleece to spin there will be far more yarn than either the kids or I can use which was pretty clear from the start.  That idea however was merely knocking around in my head without any type of action plan in place.  It seemed there would be plenty of time to figure out that situation later. As I mentioned Mom and I sit outside in the morning and evening in the shade.  During the morning that puts us right next to the driveway.  Mom gets a daily paper so for six of seven days of the week there is a person delivering it. Deb is the name of the delivery person, and she is one who wears dread locks, short cut-off jeans and flowy, colorful kaftan tops.  Remember I am in a rural part of the state where the largest city in the county has a population of just over 16,000.  Someone still dressing like a hippy is rare.  She may not be the only one in the county but odds are good one cou
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One Worth Telling - Part II

Before I move forward on the wool processing there needs to be a bit more information about the rabbit hole I went down searching for information regarding the sheep-goats.  Those who spin like to know the breed of sheep the fleece comes from to better spin it.  No one knew much about the breed of sheep so I contacted the local university extension animal husbandry person with the before and after photos from yesterdayś post to see if he could tell me anything.  I am still waiting for an answer but then I might have been asking an impossible question.  Photos are not very helpful when trying to determine a breed, I spent hours looking at images of different breeds with no luck in finding anything that looked like Daisy and Oreo.  Then my nephew shared that the sheep were a St. Croix breed.  (Perhaps I should have started there!) Note the ewe´s coat You can find more photos of St. Croix sheep, both the bearded rams and the ewes, on this website.   Finally the long, narrow faced sheep I
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