Loopy Ladies Dye Day

I've been meaning to post these photos, but time has marched on! Here are some of the photos taken during the Loopy Ladies dye workshop held at my house. We had a great time, and did a number of techniques.

This is called "Minerals". Five different quarter yard pieces are abrashed with a coppery formula. Just beautiful!






Sky at Dusk is a dip dye. Finished wool and shown along with the dip technique.







Peeking into the pot to see what's cooking!






A beautiful transcolor called "Asia."

Jo and I taking wool from a pot!

Some of our marbleized wool.

Our pancake dyed wool. Great variations in shading.

And last, I'd like to post a photo of my beautiful daughter trying on her wedding dress for her first fitting.

The ProChem Project

I must be out of my mind, but I've decided to dye every color of dye that ProChemical makes in the Washfast Acid category. What you see pictured below is 103 Straw through 351 Red.


Each piece is a quarter yard of Dorr natural wool overdyed with each individual color. 1/16 tsp. of dye was used in each overdye. I had a few reasons for wanting to do this. First, the little sample cards of overdyed yarn that you can buy from ProChem just weren't big enough for me. The water in my city is very hard (full of minerals), so I wanted to see how each color reacted to that water. Another thing this project is showing me is how deep the color is using 1/16 tsp. over a quarter yard of wool. In some cases, the sixteenth of a teaspoon gives you a nice strong color. In other dyes, the 1/16 tsp. barely covers the yard. The dye is sometimes taken up so quickly that the color can't get to the entire piece. I'm also finding out which dyes take longer to dissolve in boiling water. Red 351 is notorious for leaving spots of undissolved dye on the wool if not stirred and stirred and stirred in the boiling water. A few others are like this, too.

This is turning out to be an interesting project. It's going to allow me to lay colors next to one another to see possible blends for dip dyes and transcolor wools. Not to mention that I'm creating quite a nice storehouse of wool! I also am seeing all the colors, not just the ones I use most often and am most comfortable with.

I've taken a break from dyeing this weekend, but will get back to the project on Monday. It's been fairly easy to leave just one pot on the stove and have a pot boiling away while I'm doing something else.

My daughter is here visiting also for a few days. Today is her first fitting for her wedding dress. I'm taking pictures, so I'll post some later.

Childhood Home Rug

I finished all the drawing on the rug depicting my childhood home. I'm hoping to transfer it to the backing this afternoon. This will be my first attempt at filling in multiple pines and I've been looking over Anne Marie Littenburg's book on landscape rugs along with Jane Green Halliwell's book on pictorial rugs. This may take some work as I'm going to use a lot of yarns in the rug. Here is a photo of some of yarn I got from Webs.

I'm really happy with the greens, and I think the gray/brown (up front in photo) will lend itself to the bark well. It has a bit of a silver filament running through it, which I'm looking forward to using.

Hoping I'm not biting off more than I can chew!