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.

Ribbons

Finally we got a computer. So now I’m able to blog again, so here is a new entry.
Last Labor day weekend I had entered a handwoven doily in the Great Allentown Fair. My thought was I will give it a try and see if I get a ribbon. I also noticed that there were no woven items to speak of in any of the categories. So we have two opportunities one to show that people do still hand weave and the second was to try and get a ribbon.

Last year my intent was to enter about five pieces, that of course never happened so I only entered the doily and it won a blue ribbon. Pretty cool for the first time out he he…
So after that boost of confidence I decided to enter some new pieces this year. I was only able to get three items done. The first was the loom fitted vest that you all saw (it was one of my first blog entries). The second was a table runner or scarf and the final one is a wall hanging.

The vest only got a third place ribbon. Something I really didn’t think about in the category was the sewing part. So my detective mind is saying I got that ribbon because there was very little sewing. Well that and the judge wrote a note saying the piece was very interesting but very little sewing. The table runner got a second place ribbon this year, there wasn’t a not from the judge so I have no clue why I only got second. But I will say it beats anything under that, so I’ll keep the second place ribbon on that one. The final piece was the wall hanging this one I got a fifth place. While I was at the fair checking to see if I received any ribbons. When I got to this section I noticed that all the other entries where quilt’s except for a couple of embroidery pieces and of course my piece. So I think I really screwed that one up. In my defense there was no explanation or definition of what a wall hanging was. So all in all I had three entries and three ribbons, it’s all a learning experience and I now have a first, second, third and fifth place ribbon. So next year I will try again.

Still witho

I'm still without a computer so I snitched a friends laptop will there at work to check thinks out.

While I'm on line I will quickly tell you all that we haven't had a real summer this year. My garden at the farm was horrible, to much rain and to cold. So I got very little from it this year. Yet here at the house the garden did very well. If you are wondering why the one did good and the other not so good. The farm is up on the mountain and there is a temperature drop up there that keeps it cool. Under normal circumstances there would have been no problems with the garden the weather just did everyone up there in this year.

On another note I entered three items to be judged in the Great Allentown Fair. One was a table scarf that got second place, second was a loom fitted vest that got third place and the final was a wall hanging that got fifth place. Which is a little disappointing since last year I entered a doily and got first place, yet it is better to get some kind of ribbon then none at all which was the case for some people.

The produce stand is slow right know hopefully it will pickup with the pumpkin season. Hopefully soon I will have my own computer so I'm able to show you all pics of the stuff that I'm doing and be able to blog more. So Hope to blog again soon.

I am so....

I am so sorry for not posting anything in such a longtime. I have been very busy with several things at once. So I’ve worked on getting some things posted which are below. As the rest of the summer gets here I will try to post more things thru out the season.

I have explained in the other posts what’s been going on except for this part which I’m going to try to post about more formally. In June we started selling produce and that has taken up a lot of our time. I will explain that in a later post.

So I do hope you will all forgive me in not posting for such a long time and please enjoy the new posts below.

Fig Tree

Back in May at the herb sale I picked up a bay laurel and turkey fig tree. Transplanted them both in new clay pots and have been keeping them in full sun on my front porch. (The front of the house is a southern exposure.) It has been eight and a half weeks since all of that has taken place when I purchased them both they were the same size.

Now the fig is about four times the size of the bay, Truth be told the bay laurel is a very slow growing plant. So it is going to take the bay several years to catch up. But how cool is that the fig is growing quit nicely and some one told me I wasn’t going to get figs for thirty or more years. What do they know?

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.

Woad

One of my dye herbs that I planted at the house was woad. Unfortunately I was only able to have one plant growing at the house. All the rest never came up from the seeds that I started, you will have this and I hope for better luck next year in that department.

Any way I got some leaves from the plant to make a vat of dye. Before anyone says anything I know that one plant is not enough to dye large patches at once so I’m only going to do small ones and keep over dyeing to see how dark I can get the samples.

I used Rita Buchanan’s book A Weavers Garden, to help me with creating the vat since I’ve never worked with fresh woad or any woad come to think of it before. The first step was of course to pick the leaves. Which I did and placed them in a clear quart jar, then the book says to bring water just up to the boil and pour it over the leaves I did this as well.

The next step was to leave it alone for about an hour till you have a tan red color liquid. I didn’t do that part, what I did was to leave it set for twenty four hours in full sun. I used the hot water to get the process started and left the sun do the work of keeping it warm for the rest of the time. I left the leaves in for this long to get as much of the blue out as possible. With such small amounts of woad at one time I want to get as much out of it as I can.

The next step is to remove the leaves then add some sodium carbonate also known as washing soda and a lot of air or oxygen into liquid to turn it blue. I will say that mine never turned blue when I added air with a whisk for ten minutes no less. No instead mine was a muddy swamp water color and at that point I was hoping I had the right plant. So I moved on to the next step.

For this step I could have chosen several methods to remove the oxygen from the vat to render it usably. Since I really didn’t have a lot of success with some of those options in the past with indigo vats I went the easy way out and used Spectralite also known as sodium hydrosulphite and left it sit for about an hour. As the oxygen is removed from the vat the vat will turn a yellow tan green color.

Of course mine is neon yellow, so here the moment of truth has arrived, is this a woad vat or did I pick a foreign weed thinking it was woad. I am happy to report as I removed my neon yellow yarn from the vat it started to turn green and then blue. So yes it was woad and I did every thing correctly and I got cool results. I was never expecting a dark color, there wasn’t enough leaves for that but I did get blue on the first try too.

For any one new to woad or indigo dyeing I want to recommend that you use the power of the sun to keep your vat at the correct temperature. Also if you use a clear jar you will be able to see the changes in the vat and learn from them. Last year I had a hard time with my indigo vats trying to figure out which step I was at. This way I can see the different stages as they happen. Or you can wow all the kids in the neighbor hood with this fun experiment or project.