dyeing yarn - Knitting Notions

I am going to attempt to resuscitate this poor blog. I last posted in mid fall last year after Meredith’s wedding. Our household under went many changes in October and November and honestly I found very little energy left for the blog. Once it was no longer in my routine it was harder to get motivated to catch it up. Well, today I suddenly felt the urge to pick it back up and get back in touch with you all. Hope some of you are still willing to tune in. :-)

So what are the changes? Well for one, half of our children have now left the nest. Our oldest daughter and my grandson moved out in late September. Then of course Meredith in October. Right after Thanksgiving the last of the adult children, Cassie, Joanie and Josiah all took an apartment nearby and are doing well there. It was a big adjustment going from a household of 12 to one of 6 but I am getting used to it.

Believe it or not I have not minded taking back over all the housekeeping. The plus is that it all gets done to my liking. It does leave less time for other things of course so one must set priorities. School work has been taking a big chunk of our time also but I feel good about that. It has bothered me many times that I didn’t feel the younger children were getting as much of my supervision and energy as the older ones did. That is mainly because of the business I guess. I have let it take a slightly lower priority lately. I have been working a a lot over the winter and spring but it has been easier to work it into my schedule with less traveling this year. I have been doing quite a bit of custom dyeing for others this year. I dyed for Cookie A’s sock club and have also been dyeing fiber for a local alpaca mill. I have enjoyed that change of pace very much.

But this week we are dyeing up our yarn for the late summer and fall festival season. As the title indicates today was Blue Day around here. Want to see what we did all day?

I have been knitting sporadically and am finally on the yoke section of the upsized Sorrel I started a year ago

I know. It is shameful how long this is taking. I am at the point where I need to do some math and decision making. Rather than do that which I was not in the mood for I cast on a fun little project with some stash yarn. It’s Chance of Showers in some Elsabeth Lavold Silky Wool. It is fun!

We will do more catching up as I go along. Tomorrow’s Purple Day!

It was a very hot and sweaty day. Whew! I don’t know for sure what the high was but it sure was hot and steamy near the dye pots. I think it may have been in the upper 90’s. On the bright side though, it’s much easier to in the summer for a couple reasons. One is the longer daylight hours so we can get much more done in a day. Another is that it’s much easier to get all the yarn dry. It’s really a challenge to get large amounts of yarn dry in the late fall and winter. Also it’s hard to keep warm when it’s cold out and you are working with huge amounts of water. So even if it’s uncomfortable in the heat, it’s much easier to deal with than the difficulties of working in cooler and shorter days.

So, we are working on the semi-solids today and tomorrow. Today was blues, purples and greens. We got about 430 skeins done and will finish up the other colors tomorrow. I only got a few pictures today since I was pretty busy and I run a tight schedule to get this much done in a day. Another funny thing happened when I was trying to get some pictures; the camera had been in the house in the air conditioning and when I first brought it the lenses fogged up and it took about 15 minutes for it to clear up. The first 7 or 8 I took were all steamy looking so I deleted them. Smile