So, here it is.

It was supposed to be a very neutral moss green. The alpaca on the right is sort of, kind of close to the color it’s supposed to be, but when you open it up, it’s mint green on the inside. And I even scoured it first.

However… it carded into the most lovely, complex, heathered version of the color it was supposed to be. I’m very, very happy with it.

The photo is a bit bleached out. I have a hard time getting good pictures of dark colors.

It’s a very high color saturation, which means it took all of the dye I had to dye it. Initially, when the colors separated out I decided I wouldn’t buy that color again, but I like it so much, I want a sweater out of it for myself so I’ll totally get more. I have about 3 pounds of the dyed fibers to card and put in my shop (if I ever actually HAVE a shop).

Because of the complexity of the base, I’m going light on the tweed. I don’t want it to look messy. There are four colors of silk going in to make the tweed, but in very small amounts.

It spun up heavenly. I’m looking forward to carding it.

On Saturday, Nate took the family out to Snoqualmie Falls. I haven’t been there in many years. It was unbelievably crowded. We hiked down to the bottom (major round ligament pain) and when we were done, Nate hiked back up by himself to get the car to pick us up.

Clark has developed a sensitivity to loud noise. He spent all of the 4th of July with his hands over his ears, and I guess the thunderous falls were too loud as well, though it really wasn’t that loud.

We’ve been enjoying heading out after dinner when the house gets hot and outside is starting to cool off. We typically go to a park for some fresh air and shade.

I carded 4 ounces of my Green Tea batts,

still sampling, unfortunately. I’m testing out a new silk to see how it cards and knits up since my old silk is no longer available. So in the next day or so I should have it spun and I’m trying to decide what to knit it into. Maybe some picot edged leg warmers? Or a hat? Or a scarf? Any suggestions? I’m going to spin it woolen and am hoping to get about 180-200 yards out of it. If need be, I can card and spin more.

I’ve felt a little down this week. Not really sure why. Hormones, or fatigue, or something. Not very sociable.

Yesterday was a busy day. I carded the rest of the watermelon batts, the wool I had dyed for sample black/gold batts, and dyed 3 1/2 pounds of wool and alpaca for a new colorway. I don’t know if anyone else is going to like it, I’d say it’s a bit unconventional…

A friend of ours’ husband travels the world for work. He brought a tea set back from Japan which his family had on display in their living room and which I had admired frequently. It was broken, so when Pat went back to Japan, he bought a replacement for them and a set for me. They offered me the broken one in case I wanted it for display, and I took it for the color inspiration. I think it’s a very happy colorway. Tell me what you think.

In order to really know, I’m going to have to spin a whole batt and knit it up. My fibers are still wet, so this was just a bit carded into a rolag on my handcards but if nothing else, I certainly succeeded in duplicating the color. I’m quite pleased and think it’d look really nice woolen spun and knit into that cropped sweater in Debbie Bliss’ most recent magazine, pg 38.

The black and gold batts from yesterday’s adventures are nice, too.

In the photo you can’t really see the underlying gold very well, but it’s pretty. I’ll spin them up soon. I think the luster in the wool will give it a metallic look which’ll be neat. If I do more of this color I’ll play with the wool/alpaca ratios to bring out more of the gold.

Veronica got her ears pierced on Monday night.

She was very brave.

So, here we go. Tim backed up, tested and updated my site because he rocks. It may look the same to you, but it’s totally weird on the back end. The posting part anyway. But we’ll see if we get pictures. Thank you so much, Tim and Carol! Again. This is how many times now?

Ok, so if you like foreign movies with subtitles, and like romantic movies, have we got one for you. Nate has taken to renting Bollywood movies. I’m really not much of a movie watcher, and becoming less so as I get older because there are, in my opinion, SO many more interesting and productive things to do with 2 hours. Or in the case of Bollywood movies, 3-4 hours. So I don’t watch all of the movies he brings home, but the girls eat it up.

Anyway, we just watched Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. It’s incredible. The sweetest, most touching movie I’ve seen in a long time. You laugh, you cry (how cliche is that?). Still. I highly recommend it if your tastes bend that way at all. It does have some crazy musical numbers, but if you don’t enjoy them, it’s still worth suffering through them to see the film. The main character is one heck of an actor. Again, wow.

I’m listening to the soundtrack right now which I downloaded off of iTunes for $5. It doesn’t make me as sick as other music (remember this freaky pregnancy can’t play, sing, or even listen to music thing?) because not speaking Hindi myself, there isn’t the slightest chance I could sing along to it :-). That seems to be a real issue for me. How sing-along-able it is. I really miss singing actually. I cried on Friday when I tried to play my guitar and gagged as soon as I CONTEMPLATED singing. I hadn’t even gotten to the actually singing part.

Ok, so this is a majorly rambling post, eh?

Getting to the picture part… Here is the skien I spun from my watermelon batts. I have more batts carded, but I haven’t photographed them yet.

That seems to have worked. SO, here’s some catch-up. (It’s going to take me forever to insert all of these, ’cause I have to do it one at a time).

Liv’s dyeing and spinning experience with her 4 ounces of BFL. (Blue Faced Leister). Oh yeah, and there’s Calcifer in the background in his hospital tank. He’s all better and back in my room now.

Then there’s Veronica’s dyeing experience. She hasn’t shown much interest in spinning it.

And then there was the silk lace I spun for Carol.

Whew! I’m done. Enjoy the color, I’m going to go do something else with my day now.

This morning, after Veronica’s playdate comes by to pick her up, we’re heading out to pick up fifteen pounds of locally grown strawberries already sliced and sitting in their juice in a bucket. I’ve never bought strawberries this way before, so I don’t know how far they’ll go, but I’m hoping to make my year’s supply of strawberry freezer jam this afternoon. I’ve got the Costco bag of ripe lemons, big bag o’ sugar, and many boxes of liquid pectin all ready to go. My kitchen counter is even clean.

I have a feeling we’ll be making biscuits in the near future. Which’ll send my blood sugar into chaos and I’ll probably have to sleep it off. But whatever. We had cupcakes with whipping cream and fresh raspberries last night after dinner, and I felt fine.

I still haven’t figure out what sets me off, but I’m making considerable efforts to get more protein, and to get it frequently throughout the day.

Ok, what the heck just happened??? I scanned my post after publishing it, and all my dye talk has vanished. It’s gone. I’m so grumpy.

So the short and cross version is that I’ve come up with a new colorway that I really like. It looks like watermelon. I only have a pound of it dyed right now, so I need to dye more, lots more as I’d like to make myself a vest a la the cool sweater in the first Debbie Bliss magazine that I like. Yes, I said a vest. Me, who has ranted about how much I hate them. I’m over it. I concede that like anything, there are good vests and bad vests.

In my post that vanished, I said something about dyeing enough that I can have my vest and sell it too. I was quite amused by that.

The three vests that I have worn for years (not fully realizing that I was wearing vests) are about worn out, and I’d love to make some that fit me well. That go in at the in bits and out at the out bits. (I do in fact have a waist).

I’m excited.

I also test dyed a bit of one of my dark gray lamb fleeces with a dark, golden yellow dye. The fleece came out the most fantastic, warm, chocolatey golden brown. I want to try carding it with black alpaca and gold silk. I think it’ll turn out a bit dressy. More formal than a typical tweed. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m trying to figure out what exact color of green it is. Moss green, maybe? I didn’t have a recipe for juice that both used the things I wanted to use, and that I had all the ingredients for, so I made one up. I started with 4 carrots, and their tops. Added half of a fat cucumber, half a red bell pepper. Some kale, some celery… and then added an apple so it’d taste a little better. It probably made 16 ounces of juice, which is lot. I’m working my way through it. My stomach has been unhappy all morning, so I’m hoping I can keep it down. But it sounded good. Fresh. Full of vitamins, etc. Maybe it’ll give me some energy.

Liv finished spinning her colorful yarn from wool she dyed. It’s really pretty. Veronica kettle dyed 4 ounces of wool. Kettle dyeing is SO much cooler than handpainting, which I find to be tremendously tedious. And I hate throwing away a handful of plastic wrap when we’re done.

I’ve spent the week primarily spinning, dyeing, cleaning the house and enjoying the kids, now out of school for the summer.

I’ve been working on a new batt color, and while I love the base, my tweedy bits don’t quite match it. That’s the thing I’m finding with the tweed aspect of my batts. If the color doesn’t come out JUST so, the whole color scheme is off. Like my boysenberry silk. It needs just a TAD more red in it to be perfect with my salmon base. And it doesn’t have it. It’s too purple. So I’m going to bag it up and save it for another base color, a nice green perhaps, and I’m dyeing some mahogany to see if that fits the bill.

I’m having a heck of a time coming up with an additional color. The light green I’d envisioned isn’t all that great. So what now? A blue? Light or dark blue? Maybe I’ll keep the boysenberry and add the mahogany? No matter what I do, it looks like I need to cut down the amount of silk for this colorway. I put the same amount in the salmon base that I did in the purple, and it looks messy.

We may break out an origami kit later in the day if we get bored.

I finished Clark’s second pair of socks, and am planning a third. They’re so cute! and he loves them, though he “don’t wanna smile” this morning.

If you possibly can, please ignore my messy bathroom. I’m too pregnant/sick/tired/apathetic to make it photo ready (can’t even move 2 buckets and sweep, how lame is that?) and it’s the only spot in the house with enough light on this dark, wet morning for a picture.

Yesterday, my friend Carol invited me over to dye some of her yummy sock yarn. She showed me how to dye semi-solid in a crockpot and it was tremendous fun! We dyed 15 skeins in 3 colors.

I’m really excited to have the subtle color variations and still have a color solid enough to look good in a patterned sock.

I’m 19 + weeks now and can still wear my jeans, though I’m pushing it. I have a little more energy. My horrible cough is slowly getting better. I’m still really nauseated a lot, like right now, and have a hard time eating much of the time. It looks like I’m going to make it in to Veronica’s class today for the first time in a couple months.

I have a couple of quiet hours this morning, and I’m making batts.

This is all of it.

This is one batt’s worth of fiber.

I have enough to make about 48 batts. 6 batts per 4 ounces/2 pounds total.

I’m a little worried about the silk. This dyelot was still a test, just on a larger scale. I didn’t weight out the colors of silk, just dyed by handfuls. As it is, I do have enough of the silk, but the distribution of colors isn’t exactly right. I have too much of the light blue, and since I’m using much less light blue than the other two colors in each batt, I’m going to run out of the other two too soon. So I guess I’ll have some batts that don’t match the rest.

I’m anxious to try out some other colorways, but my alpaca supplier hasn’t had any alpaca since early December. I’m going to need to find another source.

I washed one fleece yesterday and it looks like it washed up nice. I’m waiting for it to dry so my drying racks will be free for the second.

Last night, I spun my sample purple batt into 3 ply. Today, I knit it into a long cuff, just to see how it would look and feel.

The photo is a smidge bleached out, and the towel on the floor in the background is making me crazy, but the color is pretty accurate. Just imagine it a little richer and with more luster. It’s really, really nice. I love how the tweed handles in a 3 ply. Definitely the way to go. It was knit on size 6 needles and I spun it worsted. Not my favorite method of spinning by any means, but I really liked the resulting yarn.

I think I have enough fiber already dyed to make about 2 pounds of these purple batts. Gotta start carding. I’m meeting with a friend on Monday who is going to help me figure out packaging. I need to come up with a weight and price point for packages of batts, and then I’ll be ready to move forward. Not exactly sure HOW I’m going to sell them yet. If I can get Tweedybatts.com up in some simple format, or if I should go with Etsy, or what.

So, it went pretty well. I test dyed two little skeins of yarn. The first was overrun by blue, the second wasn’t quite as dark as I’d like. I test dyed 2 ounces of tan alplaca top.

And then I realized I hadn’t added vinegar to any of it.

So I added vinegar to my dye and redyed the alpaca top, feeling like an idiot. Then, I held my breath and dyed 2 ounces of baby camel.

Here’s some pictures.

This is the alpaca and two skeins of yarn I test dyed.

I happened to have a sleeve of seed beads on the counter and saw that they might look really pretty with the yarn when spun up.

Here’s my camel, still wet. The red color isn’t that red in person. It’s more of a plum. And the green isn’t that green in person, either. I wanted two blues and two purples and that’s pretty much what I got. Maybe there’s a reason most people handpaint fibers. It’s easier.

While I was digging around in my fibers yesterday, I came across 2 ounces of dyed bombyx that a friend of mine asked me to spin for her. I thought I’d given it back because I was worried about ruining it, but I still had it, and being more confident in my spinning skills now, I’m not worried anymore. I spun a tiny little sample and it’s really pretty.

I’m going to spin the alpaca and the camel, even though they’re the same color. The camel is a gift for someone else.