Basket of Fiber

A couple of weeks ago a friend had contacted me to stop by her place to pick up something she had gotten me at an auction. Since schedules where not working out she had dropped what she had for me at my in-laws and I picked it up there. What it turned out to be was a large basket of fiber. She was telling me about it and wasn’t sure what all was there. Her thinking was wool, linen and maybe some cotton singles. Since she doesn’t spin she didn’t really know the difference or how to figure it all out or at least try to.

When I got the basket home and was able to go through it I found what I hoped to be some really cool treasures. The first think that kind of sucked though was nothing was marked. So I have to do some testing and research to figure out what I had. More testing though which I will explain.

I found a lot of wool some very soft and other not good for wearable’s. All of it but one small amount was cleaned and some was even dyed. What it was dyed with I’ll never know at a guess I would say a synthetic dye. Yet it could have been natural who knows. The natural colors were white, charcoal grey and dark brown. The last one I thought may have been Bison since we do have a farm in the valley but examining it closer I believe it to be wool. The last time I had some Bison in my had, there wasn’t any crimp to it and this does, so will go with wool.

Then I found a bag of mixed bags with small amounts of fiber in them. With in that bag I found what I thought to be silk, angora (bunny), and cotton I found some curly locks that I really don’t know what it is and some more wool. The more testing came at this point I wanted to test some of the fiber to make sure they where natural. So to do that I did the burn test, you take a small amount of fiber and burn it. If it smells like burning hair then there is a good chance it is natural. I say good chance because it could be mixed with a synthetic, so a second test it to place it in a strong alkaline. The reason you do this is all the protein fibers will be dissolved by the alkaline in this case bleach. If there is any synthetic fibers in the mix they would not be touch by the bleach. So after letting the fibers set in the bleach I determined that they where real.

So what I believe to have is a lot of wool of different types, some silk since it is a gold color I will guess and say tussah silk, a small amount of cotton. Some angora and I’m stumped on the curly locks, there not very soft so I really not sure where they came from. The final think that was in the basket was a hand made Lazy Kate. Which also had four home made spools, a cone of rug wool and some hand spun yarn. So all in all it was a really cool gift.

Front Yard Garden

This growing season as not been a real good one here in eastern PA for much of the year thus far it has been cool and raining. So a lot of what I have planted is taking for ever to grow or not at all. I planted a large veggie garden which I will talk about later. What I wanted to talk about was the small garden in my front yard.

I planted the entire front garden the weekend of the 15th of May which is the last frost date for this area. Except this year we had two frost warnings later that month I was lucky I didn’t lose anything, not even my basil which is very tender.

For the entire month of June everything was growing very slowly if at all until the last week of June going into the Fourth of July weekend. Then we had success with growth and fi

nally some warmer days with out any rain for some of them.

Now that it’s the middle of July we have some nice growth and very pretty results. My cotton is starting to come along quite nicely after such a horrible start. So I hope to see flower buds on it soon. With in the next week or so, cotton is new for me to grow so I’m not sure when the proper time for flowering is in my area. A guess says end of the month early next month so we will see.

The Amaranth is doing nicely also soon I would like to make some dye from that and see what I can get. What has been weird is the new growth of leaves has been green then turning red. Yet when I started it in March it came up red and staid red until now with the new growth. This is another plant that is the first year for me so I will see how it goes and show you the yarn that I dyed with it when I get that far.

The rest of the front yard is zinnias, herbs, veggies and some other little flowers. They have started doing well and I’m finally pleased with how it looks. When I planted they garden the first thing I did was to trim back the azalea bushes to a quarter of there size. With all of the rain they have grown back to half there size of when I cut them back.

We all so have three roses bushes that I just cut back to allow new growth in and with the flowers and herbs that I planted they have become the focal point instead of the rose bushes. So all in all everything has worked out and I hope to have a good rest of the season weather wise. Only time will tell.

Seed Germination

Now that I have my shelves and lights up Wednesday was seed planting day. I do realize for the area that I live in I should have started my cool weather seeds earlier. That just wasn’t a reality this year so I got them in on Wednesday.

I started celery, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, soap wart and cotton. I know what your saying the list of seeds that I post back in January didn’t have cotton in it. Ya’ I know that’s because the supplier couldn’t send them to me. So I had to search for a new supplier and I found one that would send them to PA. So I have green cotton and brown cotton. Yes cotton comes in a natural green and brown, no dyeing necessary. I do know that cotton is a hot weather plant but I was reading up on it and I found out it could take up to three weeks to germinate. So I wanted to get that started now to give it a little extra time.

So after they come up I will post all about how they are doing.

To dye or not to dye

These poor socks have seen better days. So why not over dye them and give them a new look. That’s a wonderful idea I said to my self so off to the dye pot I go.
After cooking them for a couple of hours in an alkaline solution to scour them, in to the mordant bath they go. I’m trying to achieve a black so an Iron mordant should do the job. But wait there not at all rust color but purple. Now what did I do wrong, well we’ll just let it simmer for an hour and continue any way.

Time to rinse out the socks and dye them, into the dye bath they go. Wow did that turn black real fast, I’ll let them sit for a while and check them in a bit.

Oh no just a light grey, not at all what I’m after. Let’s raise the Ph of the dye bath that may do the trick. O heaven for bid now it’s a red brown not at all what I wanted so well leave it in and check back later.

When I originally dyed these socks I dyed them with roses. I had done some experimentation and roses with iron on cotton came out black. Roses must have a lot of tannin. That isn’t what really happened; they came out more of a dark brown. Not a bad color for socks I was just trying for the black thing.

So this time I decided to use pomegranate rinds, I herd that with iron you get a black so I thought I would give that a try. To my dismay that is not what you get with pomegranate rinds on cotton with a high Ph, at least not wqhen I do it.

Ok let’s take them out of the dye bath and oxidize for a while then we'll rinse them. Well they came out dark after the oxidization but lightened up when they were rinsed. So here they are in the drying stage, they are better looking then when I started. But there just not the black I was looking for I guess I will have to try again another time.