Hey I realized I forgot to do F. Well F is for my favorite events - Fiber Festivals.  Today was the first one of my season.  A little local event sharing in mohair goat shearing and with various vendors setting up shop around the farm.

It was a beautiful day, but with last week’s trip, felling utterly exhausted this week with so many things going on, and attempting to stave off a sinus infection - welcome allergy season (I’m doing good - keeping up with my meds, which is keeping the allergens at bay), I was whipped.  I went to bed early and slept in.  I also can’t say I was totally with it when we went out there and my fiber sense was totally off.  Normally if there is fiber in the vicinity I can find it.  Even though I’ve been to this place a few times, I seemed to miss it and we took a lovely, but out of the way, drive around the country.  Finally we tracked back and I got to go in.

DH wished to refrain from all of the excitement and brought a week’s worth of WSJ to catch up on.  That’s fine as I didn’t feel rushed.  Well of course you know what happened, I missed all the fresh fleeces.  They must’ve sold out by 10:01 am.  I don’t need anything anyway, so lo and behold I left with nothing.  Don’t get me wrong there were some lovely stuff.  It’s just nothing screamed buy me and with the festivals just starting - I’m trying to pace myself.

The next festival is in two weeks just west of here in Cedarville  - The Stephenson County Fiber Art Fair.  It’s a small festival, but their list shows it’s focus is on the fibers.  This will be my first year for this one.  Plus if you all didn’t know - I’m heading out to the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool again this year to visit with Julie and other friends.  My samples of this year fleeces from some favorite farmers in that area should be arriving soon.  Yeah!

Finally when I came home after a long trip to Milwaukee after the festival - I was jazzed again about fiber.  This always happens to me.  Just being around people who love fiber rejuvenates my interest.  So rooted through my stash thinking more about the Danish Shawl, but settled down to start my little hat with the yarn I spun this week.  Here is is out of the dye pot.

Bright as always. 

I’ve had this inkling to do some special blends lately between my dyeing and carding. What I’ve been doing is dyeing batts of 3 different colors and then after they are dry I separate them and card them together trying to keep things as even as possible.

This batch was special, as it was going for a special birthday present to Julie. I’ve kept thinking it should be called Lagoon, while I was blending it. This is part of Pia’s fleece, a cormo-x, though I think mostly cormo, and is dyed with 3 beautiful Bush Blends. One is an ice blue, one is a aqua green, and one is a green.

About a month ago my little gang came over for a dye day. Since we have a new spinner in the group (Hi Beverly!), I convinced her to dye wool. (We actually have a couple new spinners.)  Well, needless to say sometimes the studio is more like the mad scientists cave and accidents do happen. Categorizing under mishaps is my latest disaster - felted wool out of my dye pot. Whoops.

This is the lemons - felted bit. I could barely pull bits apart.

Well at least it appears to be felted and I probably would’ve tossed it into the oops pile if Beverly didn’t say to me in passing, maybe you can put it on your carder?

So this weekend while I was fixing up another pot for her Slytherin colorway, I decided I would give it a go, what the heck - there is nothing to loose right. Well to my surprise lemons to lemonade… whohoo!

This is the new dye pot full and I did a hot pour method this time - so the colors strike quicker and are more distinct and vibrant.

It’s still not quite dry in this picture, but will be soon.

The specs on this fiber: This is a special blend of 75% Merino 25% mohair that I had specially made at Spinderellas, whom I can whole heartedly recommend as they have done a fabulous job on all my fleeces. I’ve sent them a few lemons over the last few years and they’ve made beautiful lemonade for me.

With our snow day, I was inspired to dye some more this week as I’ve been carding the first batch up of lovely rovings, which I can’t wait to spin. Even though I missed out on the NaSpiMoMo my beautiful reds and pinks fits perfectly with the fire theme of Project Spectrum.

These were meant to have a blue-green sea effect.  The top is bright blue, the middle a blue-green and the bottom more green.

So this is what we woke up to this morning and the sun was already up.

It continued to snow and snow and snow all day long, which is perfect for carding fiber, dyeing, and of course knitting.

Since we did some crock pot dyeing on Saturday, there was some left over dye in the pots and I tossed in some roving. Does this not just scream spring?

I got to thinking that it seems that I end up having a lot of leftovers when I do crank of the pots. So over time the cool thing to do would be to add some miscellanous roving and make some kitchen sink batts. This isn’t the softest roving in the world, so I’m thinking it would make a great bag once spun all funky like. Always thinking?

A couple of weeks ago our knitting group decided we wanted to get together for our first dye day of the year. We had such a blast. My studio and basement space provided a good working area and we could set up a lot of stations, so it went quite quickly. Here are the pictures. The only thing I forgot to get was a picture of my friend Beverly’s roving, which was some beautiful pinks and then green and gray Slytherin colors. You can see the rest of the results at the bottom.

First the dyepot has been cooking again.  My friend wanted a girly pink to knit some socks for her daughter.  I had some bare and here is the delightful result.

Isn’t it fun and bright pink!  Perfect for a dull winter day.

Second a huge thank you to Rissa, who sent me a huge, generous sample of camel.   This is some gorgeous stuff.

Sunshine was so impressed.  She’d like to meet this gorgeous camel that provided the fun fiber.  

This is the beginning result of my dyeing experiment.

Looks a little wild, right?

Well the other night I couldn’t wait, so I blow dried a little fluff and did a tiny sample skein. I think this is going to work.

Almost dry now and then I can do a little drum carding and blending and see if the sample is what the rest works up to be.

So one of the thing I love most about knitting and really crafting in general is the books. I’ve had quite a stash enhancement session as I basically won a $80 gift certificate to Amazon in the form of a bet… then I’ve had a few on pre-order that I always forget about and then happily dance around when they come in. One of my strange things for the list - I always forget about this one, but it’s a good one - I never lend out my books. I’m funny about that, but I keep them seriously pristine and to me it’s a collection. It’s just a crazy thing about me. I always even make a copy of the pattern I’m working on… I wouldn’t dream of writing in the book. It’s a thing, I know… but let me just say - have you seen the price of some out of print crafting books. One day they may fund my retirement for all I know.

Anyway if your interested in dyeing a really good one came this week.

The one thing I love about this book is that it has all sort of wonderful techniques.  Not just acid immersion dyeing.  It has procion mx dyeing for cottons, as well as natural dyeing, and different techniques for painting.  The format is good and has step-by-step instructions.  I would say good for the adventurous beginner, but interesting for the more experienced dyer that wants to stretch their skills as well.  I thought the projects were good and I liked the interviews with different dyers especially the Koigu ones with some pictures of their studios.  I probably would’ve liked to have seen more of those pictures.  My only other critique would be in the space dyeing projects to get stripes.  It says to make skeins that are 8 2/3 in diameter.  Just for my own mind with the yarn and weight your using I would like to know the length of the skein as well.  In other sections it says make a 60″ skein.  I would probably go through and and see the lengths they are painting and add them up to get the skein length.  At least a ball park - like expect it to be X feet would have been good in my mind.  From the picture of the two large tables pulled together to get the skein on.  I expect it’s probably pretty long.

Well at least the foodie version is back with a vengeance. Yesterday Monsieur Purl and I stopped by the Farmer’s Market. He waited with the dogs, while I scoured the place looking for some good food finds. I was really looking for some fingerling potatoes and came up without any, but did find some really beautiful leeks and other varieties of potatoes. I also found some lovely greens, a small cauliflower, and some very mild radishes.

These leeks were $.75 a piece and he threw a few in for free since I was buying a lot of them, plus some of his other fare. Immediately tales of potato-leek soup jumped in my head and this beautiful bunch went home with me.

Monsieur Purl already had two meals planned for the weekend - one is chicken noodle he has been craving since the weather turned and the other was beef stew. I helped with the chicken noodle doing the dicing - I’m a bit faster - he is a bit more meticulous. However, I did the stew in a one-pot meal all by myself.

I dredge the stew meat in flower and then placed in a heated pan with a little oil. After that browned I added red potatoes, carrots, onion, and then towards the end some green beans. Also, don’t forget my secret ingredient - garlic. I add a few cloves to a lot of recipes that would never call for it. About 3 cups of water and my stand by onion soup mix and away we go. Within 20 minutes and some biscuits later your eating. Really even with the chopping if you go fast and not as neat, it’s just under an hour. It’s quite a hardy stick to your ribs meal.

Finally potato leek is based on several recipes and is going to be my own version. This will be a new one for me as well as Monsieur Purl asked that I add bacon to the mix. I’m like what? No vichyssoise? Normally mine is a meat-less version, with a milk base, but not quite as heavy, so this has been quite the adventure. After a final prep tomorrow, I’ll review and let you know my success and what I would change in the future.

Finally it hasn’t been all cooking around here today… the dye-pots have been fired up for two days as I’ve done a little experimenting as well. First let’s do the oranges. These dyes are all Cushing dyes. For the record I do normally dye this bright and have this good of luck. Toning it down it the challenge for me.

To the left we have what was mix of gold and maize. Gold was too yellow and maize was too dark. Put them together and just right.

In the middle a simple harvest yellow with a touch of lemon yellow. The harvest too dark and the lemon too bright, but a little lemon brightens it up. The right is the orange. Not nearly diluted enough - so it’s a shock of orange. Although - excellent pumpkin colors. When I started with the orange I thought - oh my… not just orange. Nothing in nature is one color… everything has hues and shades and so shall my pumpkins… so far so good.

Next up the greens. Much more challenging. The sleeper hit of the dye party last week was silver gray green. So I place that in one pot - which is the far left.

The next three are all from the same pot. Yes - all the same pot added at different times. First was the green, which was a comical green - not seen as much in nature, so what was I to do? Why add some silver gray of course. It still wasn’t quite right, so next I added a touch of medium brown and what we have is in the middle…well middle-left.  After about an hour I added the next to the right and you can see how it picked up some brown and at that point I added touch of yellow. I don’t normally dye brown, since that is easy to find in wool, but this is an interesting green over brown. The flash seemed to get more brown than the green. Finally to get the dye to fully exhaust at another 1/2 hour I added more roving and came up with a very light green. The flash washed it out to white, but really it’s a very light green. I really didn’t plan on dyeing as much green, but really everything in nature has stems and green - so it’s not a bad thing. Maybe I’m on my way to my knitted farmyard yet.