Natural Dyeing: Blackberry

Turns out blackberries can do other things besides make delicious treats and be a pain in the garden. I love the nice purple and green that I got with berries and leaves/stems. I used an alum mordant on the yarn before dyeing. 

What I'm learning to love about natural dyeing is that each batch is unique! You never really know what you are going to get even if you try and repeat exactly what you did before. It's a wonderful surprise every time! 

dyestuff. 

Processing Raw Fleece

Apart from actually shearing a sheep or wooly animal (hopefully I will get to do this someday), I have officially worked through the entire fleece to yarn process!

Recently I was given a bag of raw, stinky, dirty, greasy, lovely local sheep's fleece. Finally I began the project of processing it. Washing fleece is easy! I was afraid at first because of the dangers of felting, but I had no problems. I wasn't even that careful.

How To Wash Raw Fleece:
I washed my fleece in 4 steps. It took about 40 minutes.
1) hot water bath, 2) hot soapy water bath, 3) hot rinse bath, 4) another hot rinse bath.
They say that temperature shock can cause the fleece to felt, but those people are too paranoid I think. Start by submerging a big pile of dirty fleece into a big bowl of hot water - as hot as you can still put your hands in. The hot water will help to remove some of the grease from the wool. Do not agitate. This really will cause felting. I just gently pressed it and spun it around occasionally with my hands. After letting it sit in the hot water bath for about 10 minutes, drain the yucky water slowly into the sink while holding onto the wool in the bowl. Remove the wool from the bowl and fill it up again, this time with hot water and some soap. The amount of soap isn't particularly important, probably similar to washing dishes. Wait another 10 minutes. Continue in this fashion, giving it however many hot water rinse baths to get the soap out. Do not try and rinse the wool under a faucet. It will get rinsed just fine by soaking in a couple of hot water baths. Squeeze out the water, and lay out to air dry. It should come out looking like step 2 in my picture above.

Carding wool is important for getting the fibers aligned and ready to spin. I figured it out using this youtube video. I use wire dog brushes instead of carders, because they work great and are cheap.

I'm getting faster and better at spinning too! That skein in the picture only took me the better part of an evening! I'm excited to do some more dyeing experiments on it. :)

Natural Dyeing: Queen Anne's Lace (Wild Carrot)

I got a nice pale yellow on my homespun wool with Queen Anne's Lace. Also known as wild carrot, this grows wild all over the northwest. Credit goes to Jenny Dean and her book Wild Color.

Have I mentioned yet how AMAZING this book is? My mom got it for me for my birthday and I've just been devouring it. It provides clear and lovely instructions for dyeing with all kinds of flowers and trees and weeds and such, most of which are easily harvestable from the wild around here.

One thing that happens in the summer is that my free bus pass goes away since I am no longer a student. Another thing that happens is that I walk everywhere because I don't want to spend a dollar on the bus. Lately, I've been doing the lovely hour long walk downtown almost daily, and it's been nice to get a little more physical activity into my routine. Frequent nature walks, combined with knowledge from Wild Color has helped me begin to spot dye stuff everywhere I go!

This is where I first noticed the abundance of Queen Anne's Lace. It's everywhere under the 5th avenue bridge and all the way along the railroad track and beach trail that goes to the west side. One day on my walk, I brought along scissors and a bag and went crazy.

Following the recommendations in Wild Color, I used alum mordant and a hot dyeing method, boiling the plant matter for at least half an hour, and simmering the yarn with it for another 45 minutes. I would recommend putting the dyestuff or yarn in some kind of mesh bag or cheesecloth or something, because plant chunks got all up in my yarn.