Monday, August 20, 2007

unseasonably cool

It's August and I'm cold. It's kinda nice. I'm ready for September and some big wooly knitting.
But it the meantime, there's this...
wooly hibiscusa kind of smoky pink yarn from the hibiscus dye bath

Saturday morning I went grocery shopping at the Latino/Asian mart, an oddly ironic store because peanut butter and cheerios can be found in the international aisle...but they have dyestuffs in the spice aisle.
A bastard saffron, that I'm treating like safflower. The real stuff is $90 an ounce. I got this for $1.49 an ounce. Hence safflower. I'm hoping to extract a hot pink dye from it. I've also got chamomile, great for tea, butI had no idea it could be used for dyeing. And annatto seeds, which give that odd orange color commonly seen in Filipino and Latino foods, hopefully it'll do the same for yarn.
So far I like the ease of solar dyeing, stick it in a jar, put it in the sun, then forgetaboutit. It just takes a while to get results. So I built a solar oven (I applied aluminum foil to the inside of a cardboard box), that got rained on while I was at work today. Oh, well, I tried.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

when its too hot to knit...

the sun does have it's uses...
Dried Hibiscus Flowers
Hibiscus Flower Sun Tea
Wool in Hibiscus Flower Tea/Dye bath
Wool is just too hot in my hands for knitting in this heat, so I used cotton for this...
Trellis (with my wonky cables) is just waiting for buttons.