Saturday, January 30, 2010

Next Thing You Know, I'll Be Raising Sheep...

I could. It says "livestock" right in our neighborhood CCRs. There would be the coyote issue, however.

Meanwhile, friend Clarkie (wife of former cycling/tandeming buddy Jason) thought we should do some yarn dyeing. They were coming to town to visit family, so we set aside a day. I spent time the day before mixing up all the dyes (demoting several kitchen utensils to Non Food Use Only), and collecting various bits of gloves, drop cloths, etc.

Also spinning like a fiend, to have enough yarn to dye, in addition to the one skein of commercially produced undyed sock yarn. There's good stuff on the SyFy channel at 2am, really. Caprica, for one.

Mindlessly spinning away

We both went for variations of the Purple Haze and Willow, with Clarkie also adding in Spiced Pumpkin.

While things were steaming, and then hanging to dry, I got Clarkie started on spinning, both on a spindle, and the wheel.

We were both pleased with the results.

Hand dyed commercial yarn

Clarkie's hand dyed yarn

my hand dyed handspun

I think the colors over the naturally silver/gray handspun look pretty darn cool. And yes, that is 100g of 3-ply sock yarn.

2 comments:

Chuck Buchanan said...

My wife and her mom have sheep. Trust me, you don't want to raise your own. It's much more economical, in terms of stress levels, etc. to just buy the raw wool and then spin it. I'm firmly convinced that a sheep goes through life in search of a means of ending its existence, and quite often finding it...

Anonymous said...

For some reason my son's name ended up on my comment. This is actually Chuck.

Hi Lynne!