named thus because knitting him kept me calm on the plane during our little trip last fall, this guy has been on the needles since then - and is finally finished! the pattern is from an issue of spin-off from last summer - he is an estonian sheep puppet.
last night, when he was just one ear short, i put him on my hand and made him dance to the closing-credits music of the movie we were watching. i now realize i have entirely new level of power over ben's emotional life. i have never seen him laugh so hard, so fast. and so predictably - all lowell had to do was move his arms and ben was in tears.
a simple man, my husband.
this yarn, by the way, is stuff i dyed with mac in the summer. i think i do a pretty good near-solid; at least i do it the way i like it.
more dyeing coming up within the next few weeks.
If we're all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple!
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
for those content with that little patch of purple, there is a recently produced a history of the international dyestuff industry that is fairly fascinating. via layers of meaning.
i'm so pleased with it! it's all a bit darker and richer than this - it's a very bright day. seems i still had manolo prieto on the brain when i was mixing color. this is the sock yarn that i dyed on sunday. some of this is going back to the friend who gave me all the undyed merino sock yarn to begin with. now i'm increasingly interested in getting undyed yarns, and also interested in dyeing cellulose fibers in addition to proteins. i've still got a great pile of natural jacob upstairs, and some colors i didn't try on sunday! hmmmm...
today mac came over to dye yarn. i had never used any chemical dyes (unless kool-aid counts) and had some procion dyes i wanted to try. i also had a groaning board of pristine yarn: a LOT of sock merino sent by another pal, and some aran wool that my ex brought me from ireland. (see off to the right is some of the undyed, natural jacob that came from ireland as well - some of that ended up getting dyed too.)
orwell's 1984 predicted, If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. that is exactly how i feel about multicolored yarns. so i didn't make any; all i knew going into this today was that i wanted a blacky-red (surprise), and i wanted a really sickly green.
i started with the red. steaming hot, the lower left hand corner is the merino sock, the upper right is the natural jacob.
we have a laundry tub with a drain in it that
ben
was able to lug up from the basement; this way we could soak, and rinse, yarn without making a big mess in the kitchen. (note neighbors jimmy and joey's fig tree and grape arbor in the reflection.)
mac tried something rather adventurous in her crock pot, and something rastafarian in the dishwasher. how did they turn out? look and see.
we were surprised when three pounds of mac's own handspun all went into the same pot and each skein came out, well, completely different. even those among us with no color vision were surprised at the variation (and of course snubbed it.) we feel confident that mac will know what to do with it next. 
and thus concluded our morning's experiment! as you see on the chair, i did get my sickly green, too - more pictures when everything is dried and put up. how do i feel about this dyeing thing? it's interesting. i think i could learn more, and i think i could get better.
since mac and i were so busy
ben
had the whole morning to himself... which he chose to spend lugging laundry tubs, driving to get french pastries for mac and me, and making us espresso drinks!
let me just clarify.
people give "kool-aid" to their children...
to drink.
ew.
well, bub -- you're soaking in it.
although it hurt my heart to do it, we returned to our old apartment this morning, clippers and brown kraft paper bags in hand, to harvest seeds from the indigo and flax plants.
the indigo is flowering, as you can see. it's maybe a little younger than i might have liked to take it, and i know the building's owner (and the new tenant, who are actually the same person) wouldn't mind; but frankly, it was still sad for me and i wanted to get it over with. i still think i'll get plenty of viable seed.
the flowering japanese indigo is so beautiful. i hope we get plenty of it here at the new house.
i am still spinning my cotswold fleece. it makes spinning on the wheel easy for me. must be some sort of beginner-type sheep. i think i'm getting better.
hillel was a lot less interested in the spinning of the wheel than i thought he would be.
and i did indigo. i made one praying mantis very angry indeed, but was trying harder not to mistake him for indigo (and cut him in half) than i was catering to his general happiness.
i used the indigo on some of the cotswold roving. some of it came out very deep indeed! i think that was the most indigo leaves i have ever used at one time -- i have certainly got more plants than ever. in the new house, there will be a planter in the backyard just for indigo. i may even be able to start letting it "compost" so that all the plant matter rots away and just the dye itself remains. that is the "real" way to do it.
i've had a longstanding desire to knit with unspun silk. and since i just happened to have a silk cap lying around, i pulled it, and started knitting some swatches with it.
catches on every microscopic shred of skin on your hands, it does. but then again, this stuff didn't break ONCE -- not once, in the pulling OR in the knitting. that's pretty amazing for something so ethereal.
not bad. but a lot of trouble to go through to create something that looks for all the world like a standard-issue hospital surgical scrub cap!
goodness. how big we have gotten.
almost two whole months since their baby days, the mantids still seem to enjoy the indigo plants.
the unspun silk "waste" that i dyed with cochineal came out very differently than the soy silk did.
later in the week, i picked some of the early indigo. notice how a bruised indigo leaf turns blue. notice also, if you are mature enough, the hot ladybug sex occuring on the indigo plant.
with this indigo, i attempted to dye some bamboo/silk fiber blend. it didn't exactly turn blue -- it went from being a natural yellowish, to looking like it had been holding its breath for a long time. rather silvery.
i'm not exactly sure what comes next but i'm working on it.
by the way, since he was in town today getting the liberty medal -- who else is with me on having a crush on president of afghanistan hamid karzai and his sexy astrakhan hats?
i purchased a bag of cochineal -- which is an insect-derived natural red dye -- last winter, and this weekend, got up the nerve to use it. dyeing with cochineal requires mordanting, which is something i was not all that comfortable with. different mordants will produce different hues, and i had purchased some alum to get a good deep scarlet. (next to black, i love red the most.)
just talking about the mordanting last night -- along with ordering letterpress cuts to be made from some original art for an upcoming book project, and talking about magnesium v. copper, had me all hopped up and anxious about metals. ben told me, for instance, that pure magnesium ignites on contact with air. so last evening i kept peering around corners in fear of running into pure magnesium, like it was donald pleasence in a james bond film.
we got through the mordanting process unscathed, although it kept me hopped up late into the night and we ended up eating, well, breakfast at the oregon diner. which, although the phrase is overused, is like a fellini casting call. also, there appears to be a large statue of, well, stalin, on oregon avenue... ben insists that he is the franchise owner of the south philadelphia fashion bug shoppes. complete with imitation of stalin that i guarantee none of you will ever, ever see, not even after a few glasses of wine on thanksgiving.
anyway. what i wanted to turn red was -- this handspun soy silk of mine, and this skein of noro kureyon.
notice that the soy silk has bits of blue in it -- i threw it in an indigo pot last year, before it was spun up, when it was still roving. the indigo dyepot had been near exhaustion at that stage, and so you see, blue only showed up in certain spots. then i spun it, and got this. the plan was to overdye. that's where the cochineal came in.
i got the cochineal dyebath going while ben slept. unlike the mordanting process, this was fun -- and utterly perfumey! a really, really sweet and exotic smell. and when the first batch of it was ready -- it was a mezmerizing, slasher-movie, heart's-blood red.
"smells like... pancakes," said the barely coherent man who had only gotten up to go to the bathroom.
anyway, the dyebath is not quite exhausted yet, but when it is, it will go outside to be used as compost for none other than the indigo plants. right now the effect of this project on our kitchen is no less than hitchcockian. downright.
the very first flax flower of the year!
... along with the first strawberry!
we all have different measures of success in life. but sometimes you find yourself saying a sentence that joins what would seem to be disparate elements into something that just sounds, well, fabulous and grand.
some say, "brad pitt bought me this emerald to commemorate my academy award nomination!"
some say, "i was happy to further america's awareness of gay and lesbian parenting by saddling these innocent children with david crosby's DNA!"
but i say, there are baby praying mantids all over my indigo plants.
keep dreaming those dreams, people. they do come true.
you have already met egon (above.) now, meet gary, tucker, and jawanda.
i should explain that, for pest control, we did purchase some praying mantis egg sacs. i think this is how we got into this predicament. the egg sacs have been in a covered vase in our kitchen windowsill for a few weeks. and when i woke up this morning and came out to make coffee, i was faced with, more or less, this:
ben and i then ran around in various stages of déshabille until we got the camera, some clothing, and the vase, and went outside to start distributing mantis babies.
this is liesl...
and this is hieronymous...
and obviously this is just a second picture of hieronymous.
well, we are more or less in heaven. ben was a little tentative at first, but now he is missing them, while he is at work.
two hundred tiny hats, coming up.
wow. seed-saving works. i've got exponentially more indigo than i did last year. in fact, once this starts to get bigger (and it's already started to start), i am going to have to get some big new pots. and give some away.
here's some fiber flax, too, but it looks a little spindly and sparse compared to the indigo. it tends to full up, though, come late summer.
and not a penny did i spend on seeds this year!
you may remember the baby bleu cheese hat, for which i spun the yarn, knitted, dyed with indigo from my garden, and felted. here it is, at long last, on a human baby named taariq.
smashing!
i came away from this holiday season embarassingly well-appointed for knitting. i have a new set of denise interchangeable needles. (i hear they get mixed reviews, but i am THRILLED with mine -- it's like having lego and knitting needles all at the same time, and i find them sturdy and smooth and light.) i also have a brand new ott-lite, which is not only good for both knitting and letterpress work, but for plants!
speaking of things that combine knitting and letterpress -- not to mention my beloved 19th century -- you are seeing here pictures of a beautiful, small-print run, letterpress "receipt" book of dye recipes from a shaker community.
ben
and i are now into futsy little things like bindings and whatnot, but i won't bore you with that. this book is lovely and historical, and filled with good dye recipes -- and samples of wools dyed with those actual recipes!
it's a beautiful little keepsake, and makes my fingers itch not only to dye yarn, but to set type. (with any luck, the printing press we have named "ludovine" will be here by my birthday in early february! we received a call from utah recently. she is receiving finishing, loving touches there.)
ben's an awful good gift-giver, don't you think?
my dad is becoming dangerous on the internet. that is to say, he is starting to do it on his own. dad -- please hit the back button.
okay! i am tempting fate by posting the finished product a whole six days before christmas morning, but here it is: the footstool that i have made for my father (with help from a few special people, as usual.) this footstool has a long and storied past, starting with the yarn: soy silk that i spun and dyed, and dog hair from our dead family dog that i also spun. it also features a photographic image of my father as a toddler, along with some of my aunts, which i transferred with the use of a large halftone negative onto a piece of fabric treated with photographic chemicals.
we bought a footstool frame, and ben stained it. brett and lisa at rosie's yarn cellar helped me figure out how to make my piece of knitting frame the photo correctly (i worked from the outside-in.) then grace was very patient helping me to put a fabric backing on the piece, and dorlynn suggested the grosgrain ribbon edging -- and helped hammer the furniture tacks into it! the whole thing went from being a very floppy and doubtful-looking project to a very solid one, over a course of weeks. believe me, i worried i'd be going to borders on christmas eve for a booby-prize gift cert! but it seems we've made it. lots of people have seen the work-in-progress and it has spawned my brief and testy
footstool FAQ
Q: wow! that's really neat! do you think your dad is going to APPRECIATE IT?
A: (pitying snarl)
Q: isn't it a little WEIRD and DEMEANING to put a picture of your FATHER on something people are going to put their FEET on?
A: (disbelieving perplexed snarl)
erm, i'm starting to feel a little holiday stress building. this came together the way i wanted it to, and i think it will have a very happy recipient. it doesn't speak to me being such a great knitter or spinner, that's for sure -- but i dare anybody to have a better dad.
dad, i said get the fuck off my page.
... and another good gift idea, if you should happen to need one. and EVERYONE needs blank books -- especially knitters.
you can see that the book i got for myself (yes, i did purchase another as a gift for someone, too) fits my "blue period" quite nicely. this book was made by the clever folks at ex libris anonymous, who take old, orphaned books -- whose covers are probably a lot more fun than their contents -- and make them into sturdy and charming blank notebooks!
the price is right (eleven dollars a book, and that includes shipping and handling), and they are quite one-of-a-kind!
a couple of mornings ago i hobbled out (crutchless) to my big old japanese indigo plants, and picked the drying flowers, in hopes of saving plenty of seed for next year's experiments.
my playtime with fresh-leaves indigo baths earlier this season was, after all, only play. fresh leaves are not the way to get a deep, lasting, saturated blue. that is done in a long, painstaking process, using leaves that have been composted until no organic matter remains except the blue dye itself, then using that stuff in a carefully balanced, heated, long-tended dye vat. far more than my urban resources allow me to do, not only in terms of the indigo i have, but in terms of time, space, and abilities.
so what can one do?
believe it or not, the japanese have invented a freeze-dried indigo vat! just add water and you have a ready-to-go vat of deep, blue, strangely smelly stuff that does indeed turn your yarn (or whatever) very, very blue. it's as easy as making kool-aid!
i tried it, and i loved it. here you see the results. you have seen this yarn before: it is the plied wild silk from
habu textiles
and the soy silk that i spun on my drop spindle.
to which, i added a little of the coby yarn...
... to make this rather mark rothko-like swatch, which, yes, is on it's way to being what i hope will be a very special project.
today
ben
and i celebrated our second anniversary. i made him a memento from our first indigo dyeing session. i had given away a lot of the yarn we dyed that day, but had made swatches of each type.
the little handmade book, on beautiful paper and fastened entirely with brads, no glue, and with a gold-marbeled cover, was given to me in a swap. i traded the woman who made it a big stack of chinese fortune-telling fish for three of these little books.
we in fact did a little more indigo dyeing this weekend. one of our plants was stolen a few weeks ago, giving us 25% less to work with, but i am satisfied with the knowledge that the person who stole it probably thought it was a basil plant. how i would have loved to have been there when the spaghetti sauce was being brought to the table. we still have plenty, and are getting more accustomed to the process and the smell.
ben is fond enough of my little handmade presents (i am lucky in this) that he says he will be devoting a space on the bookshelf to them. i would give him the world.
there are those of you reading who know me well enough to know that bleu cheese is a very, very important part of my life.
i can't remember exactly when i said to myself "i wish to knit a baby hat that looks like a small, artisinal bleu cheese," but i definitely said it.
in this case, not only did i knit it -- i spun it, i felted it, and i dyed it with indigo from my own indigo plants using a semi-shibori technique. (do you hear the implied "beat that!" in that statement of fact?)
i thought i might have to wait awhile for a progressive enough set of parents to come along to put this hat on their baby boy (i wanted it to be a boy's hat). i didn't have to wait long at all. this is going to kori and herry's new baby, who last i heard wasn't named yet. i am hoping they will like it. i know i'd love to see the baby in it. i do realize that my current model -- now nicknamed "murder baby" -- is a little on the stephen king side. anyhoo, i think i'm finished with my baby hat knitting spurt.
isn't it kind of funny that the day after i first dyed with indigo, we would see this place in cape may?
the japanese indigo plants had reached critical mass. (as had my dilletantism.) we had spectralite, and we had ammonia. we were so ready.
we began by getting our leaves together and heating them.
i chose some things i wanted to put in the pot. they weren't all white; i had a few skeins of lopi that i didn't really love the colors of. i had handspun (my own and a buddies, and in the form of both yarn and hat), and i had some boring white worsted. in the long run, i realized that i wasn't going to have enough blue to go around for all of this, so i compromised and not everything made it in.
we had problems with the first batch; nothing happened (except a bad smell. do you know that in ancient japan, indigo solution was made alkaline with stale urine, then fermented in the sun? yay!) we could see that we had done something almost right, as there was a slight suggestion of blue to our yarn now.
ben
said it looked like a very pale person's face. if we were fancypants handspun yarn moguls, we might have called this yarn "cyanotic".
then, we did a "post-mortem" and some troubleshooting on our dyeing session, and headed back out to decimate the plants. this time, it worked. go ahead, load the video -- to see the absolute magic of yarn going from a sickly yellow to a wonderful blue. it's about a forty five or fifty second movie, so it'll take even the fastest of you a few seconds to get ready. but i think thou will be pleased.
here's some blue, smelly yarn for you. i hope we did not take so many leaves off the plants that we won't be getting another batch in august -- this was fun! anybody have anything they wish was blue? or that they wish stunk really bad?
it seems the wrong time to mention, but blue is one of my least favorite colors. what turned out best in my batch was the natural grey-brown handspun (not my own) that got a very interesting, meaningful, hazy color.
... it's true. i went out to our little garden yesterday and saw this.
am i crazy, or is that a more or less perfect buttonhole that she is making there?
true to humanity's brutal and selfish nature, i completely forgot about her after taking the pictures, and poured about ten gallons of water on the web. whoops. i give her the right to be found inside this morning, ripping out rows of my shroud of turin washcloth project. that will teach me.
here's some grown-from-seed flax. eventually, it becomes linen, you know. making it possible to grow a sweater from a seed. all i'm hoping for this year is to get enough flowering plants to do seed gathering. then, next year, watch out. (maybe).
on the indigo front...
the japanese indigo plants are getting monstrous. spectralite reducing agent, and soda ash, for making an alkaline solution, is on its way. we have to get moving to do our fresh leaves bath. these plants that you see here are becoming rather burned in the sun, and are starting to go to seed a bit as well. it's time to move! 
this is also indigo. it isn't japanese indigo, it's just "indigo". the plants will not be big enough to dye with this year, but, like the flax, i hope to get seeds from them.
not really, no.
but i am growing indigo. here you see some big, dark, mature leaves in the photo on the left. that middle photo is a second generation plant -- i thought he was gone, but he came back! we call him "indigo junior". he is surrounded by fiber flax plants. can't wait to see what those do either. then, on the right, an indigo plant with it's little flowers showing. don't look like much, do they? they look like pepper plants.
the plants on the right and left were purchased at the maryland festival. all three plants (the middle one, or the plant it was parented by, was purchased in maryland in '02) are japanese indigo. i also have some "western"-type indigo that i grew from seed in my bedroom window right now, but it's pretty small.
i'm not going to have enough leaves to "compost" or make indigo balls or paste this year, but i am going to try a fresh leaves bath and attempt to get a blue dye from it.