unsweatering

It was warm enough the other day to open the window and let Angie scheme about what she would do when she escaped to the outside again. When we first moved here last spring she managed to scramble up our bed and slipped out the broken screen. I had no idea until we ran into each other on the back porch. Ever since that day she's known she's being kept from all the fun and longs for a ferret ladder to an open window.

I'm toying with the notion of adding reclaimed, plant dyed yarn to the farmer's market booth. I keep an eye out for not-acrylic sweaters when we go thrift store shopping. It's a cheap, if labor-intensive way to add 1,000 yards to your stash. I've deconstructed a few this week and realized that they all seem to have a chirality to them, a handedness to the direction in which each garment was seamed together. Once I caught on to it I was able to break them down much faster and with less fear of wasting yarn by cutting the wrong bit.

 I love the range of colors you can get from rubia tinctorum, from pink to purple and even yellow. But, the next round of madder I buy is going to be chopped and not powder. It's such a pain in the dye bath. Either you let it free and it gets all over the fiber or you have to use a tea towel to strain it because anything with a looser weave will let it get all over everything anyway. If I had more patience it probably wouldn't even be an issue. This dye bath gave my a nice purple with pink highlights on a wool and cotton blend. The leftover bath is cold processing some lambswool skeins in a tucked away corner of the kitchen. So far they're a pale orangey pink.