A Good Day to Dye

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a "good day to dye" event at my place.  I pulled all my dyes out of the cupboards and shed, dug up skeins of handspun yarn and all kinds of fibre and called my girlfriend.  She signed on and brought bags of loose fibre, rovings and skeins of yarn.  We had more than enough to play with.  The weather was perfect for this, sunny skies and the bugs stayed away for the most part.

Here is a photo essay of our day.

This is the dyeing studio a.k.a my back porch.

We threw some loose fibre into dye pots and we also painted skeins of yarn and then steamed them.  The skein being dyed here is from the fibre cleaned in my rain barrel experiments.

Here's my friend painting a merino roving.  After the painting, it got rolled up in cellophane, left to sit for a spell and them put into the steamer.

One view of the drying rack with all the finished projects.

Next day view of the drying rack.  When the rovings were fully dried, I opened then up and am very happy to announce there was no felting at all!

From left to right:
Blue and pink shiny fibre is caesin -- the silky fibre from milk proteins; grey/blue roving -- straight up corriedale from Humming Bee Farm; pink/orange roving -- merino/silk blend; grey/pink skein -- cheviot two-ply; yellow/blue skein -- polwarth two-ply spindle spun; blue/purple skein -- hodge-podge of singles hanging about the studio that got spun into two decent sized skeins.  Variety of fibres. This may be hard to believe and you may think I am making this up, but I actually have plans for every bit of fibre here and each skein of yarn. Stay tuned so I can prove to you it's true.

Field of Flax progress

Hubby texted me this morning and told me my flax is blooming.  Can't wait to get home and take photos of it.  This photo was taken yesterday morning.

Moving Garlic or Life on the Flood Plain

What you are looking at is my garden. It sits on the south west corner of the property.  This photo was taken on the morning of June 24th.  The Fraser River was rising -- had in fact been steadily rising for a week, and now was reaching the point where it was causing some serious inconvenience to us.  For as I stated earlier, this is my garden.

This is our garlic.  The wee piece to left of this photo is my flax, but that will come in another post.  This is garlic in full regalia, which now that the days are getting shorter (imagine that, we haven't even had summer yet!) it is focused on putting all its energy into making bulbs.  I don`t need to tell you that garlic doesn`t like to sit in water.  For any amount of time.

So in the midst of flood preparations and our own preparations to head out of town for a week, we decided we need to move the garlic to higher ground.

Fortunately we had a bed prepared -- ready for the annual planting of basil -- but it was there, it was dry and so, in went the garlic.

Here it is, newly planted.  Not sure if this was the right thing to do.  But we figured it could die here (maybe) or die in the standing water (for sure).

Will let you know how it turns out.